The IT collaborative was formed by the United Way of Delaware and United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) in 2005 with the goal of increasing IT capacity, dependability, security, and sophistication while dramatically reducing costs. Since then, over sixty other United Ways around the country have joined the collaborative.
By combining and centralizing technological resources and eliminating redundancies in both staffing and hardware/software, the collaborative has allowed its members to see a reduction in costs while dramatically increasing capacity. For instance, prior to the collaborative, each organization had its own set of exchange servers to provide messaging services, its own spam filtration system, and its own virus detection system – not to mention staff to manage all of it. Once messaging was centralized in the collaborative, one system is capable of servicing unlimited numbers of United Ways and their employees. This not only gave us an immediate savings on hardware, software, and personnel, but it ensures going forward that each organization will be able to maximize their capital dollars during the hardware refresh cycle.
By combining, we are also able to invest in more advanced technology and more skilled staff than any one organization is able to justify on its own. We have dramatically increased our uptime by enhancing our monitoring and redundancy capabilities. For instance, every service we offer has a redundant system backing it up. So in order to experience a failure, each of the redundant hardware devices – which themselves have redundancies built in such as redundant disks, redundant NICs, redundant power supplies, redundant fans, etc – would have to fail at the same time. In the case of some systems, there are three redundant systems that would have to fail at the same time to cause a failure. In addition, our systems are monitored 24/7/365 to enable us to fix issues before they become a huge problem.
Members benefit from our philosophy to ensure no one has to reinvent the wheel. What does that mean? All of our work product is available to all members. So, whatever products the collaborative develops for one member are available at no cost to all other members. Therefore, members have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of projects that have been developed over the last 5 years that run the gambit of checklists and manuals for ePledge customers to website content management systems.
The Collaborative’s bulk purchasing power means discounts for all our members. By offering members the ability to centralize their IT purchasing with us, they receive better pricing than they could on their own and the additional purchasing that they generate gives the other members decreased pricing as well.
http://www.unitedwayitcollaborative.org
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