The case of the radio station of the Corporación Minuto de Dios
If during 1958 someone had told Priest Rafael García that one day the organization that he was just founding would have all his information in something called a cloud and that he would be supporting something called the internet, he would have thought, like many at the time That such a thing was only going to be possible in Hollywood movies.
60 years ago, when the mission and activities of this Colombian organization were just beginning to be forged, the purpose was very simple: to give support to the least favored seeking the help that was necessary from society and from those who had a little more to strengthen the fabric. Social. Today, they are bigger in many ways: the mission remains the same but the actions have not only intensified but also diversified.
The transition process
Currently, the Corporation is in the cloud, where hundreds and hundreds of hours of station recordings, dozens of documents between areas and hundreds of emails that use the internet and connections every day to reach the same number of mailboxes pass through. Jeimmy Figueroa, the infrastructure coordinator of the Corporation, is the one who now has the challenge of implementing cloud services for the organization, which has not been an easy task.
Until just over a year ago, Minuto de Dios had all of the organization’s information stored on hard drives and computers distributed throughout the headquarters, in the cities where it operates. There was no centralization and when an incident occurred, information security was threatened by the affected devices. So one day, after analyzing all the options to improve your systems, the pros and cons of using cloud services; They identified the keys: They needed to change, improve and do more to increase their productivity and generate more impact.
Buying new, more sophisticated equipment with greater capacity, which until now had been done, was not the most viable solution because they would present the same limitations over time: the lack of storage capacity and the innumerable risks presented by the devices. Physical when dealing with the environment and the possibility of loss of information. Thus, the cloud solved a large part of everything that until then had problems: collaboration, storage capacity, integration with other applications such as email and centralized systems.
The change decision
The journey to the cloud began more than a year ago when the decision was exactly that: upload to Microsoft’s Office 365, in two of its versions: E3 and Business Premium and thus have control of connected users and give them more capacity and mobility. (Know here the different options of Microsoft Cloud for your social organization and here for your MyPyme).
“Each user has 1 Tera of storage and it does not matter if the equipment is damaged, their information is not affected and the daily operation continues smoothly,” says Jeimmy, who serves 140 users nationwide from the Corporation’s headquarters in Bogotá. Much more fluid communication has also been created between the various work teams using Teams as institutional chat, which has allowed them to have greater control over the information that is shared.
As an organization with different locations in the country, it is increasingly urgent that its collaborators can move without problems and sometimes, without computers, using mobile applications, which has been possible with Office 365.
Innovation and improvement
Daily, this organization produces 5 Teras of radio content that in the past were downloaded to hard drives that were easily damaged, as reported by Jeimmy: “One day they called me at 3 in the morning because the team that had some Tb of wedges failure (…). Now with the cloud, the information is synchronized. ” Thanks to the cloud, system failures are almost non-existent and Jeimmy can connect from anywhere and access this information, as well as troubleshoot remotely.
Still, cloud implementation still has a way to go. Some challenges are presented, such as the organizational culture of a traditional institution that is faced with totally new digital environments and to which people are still adapting, while learning about the new system and learning to use it every day. Being open to change has allowed them to innovate and take the necessary steps to begin to transform digitally successfully.
Keep learning and move forward
Now the Corporation’s most important challenge is to train all its users in the use of Office 365 so that they take full advantage of all the applications and have greater autonomy in the use of the tool.
Just like God’s Minute, any organization can begin to walk the path to digital transformation by uploading to the Microsoft cloud with benefits for social organizations.
Taking the first step and making the decision is a step that is not complicated: the first thing is to do an analysis of what your organization needs in terms of innovation and technology, since not all are the same nor do they need the same to start moving to the cloud or to generate changes and transformations in your systems. If you want to start, make this diagnosis of digital transformation.