08
AT THE HEART OF IT G
ently beating at the heart of nearly every modern organisation today is an IT department. The IT department is often the butt of jokes as the stereotypical IT person is a socially inept nerd with few friends and is seldom fully understood as the department and what they do is really only ever noticed when things go wrong. Well here at Holstein we are really no different – apart from the socially inept bit. We do have a department at the heart of our organisation and I’d like to introduce them and a little of what they do. The department is a group department, and by that I mean it provides services and support to each and every part of our organisation including Holstein UK, CIS and CDI. It is based presently at Scotsbridge House, is headed by Michael Hirani-Smith and provides three distinct services.
First is the infrastructure service. This means hardware and it includes the PCs used on the desk and in the field, the central “server” hardware on which all of the computer applications run and the technical equipment used by the classifiers and milk recorders.
This is a two man team based in Scotsbridge House. This mechanical heart of our world is also the base for all of our web services so in reality, the IT team provides a service to not just internal users, but thousands of external users. Strategically we aim to move
most, if not all, of our core server capability into the cloud. The cloud is a buzz word used in the IT world and it simply means ‘somewhere else other than your own building that is easily accessible via the internet’. For us it means moving equipment, at the right time, into a high grade and highly secure data centre. Second comes the web team. The people who run our internet sites that are used internally a lot, but primarily externally. This team, reporting to Michael, is a combination of internal staff and external resource with two people internally based at Scotsbridge House and a flexible number, based on our requirement at the time, based externally. All websites, and ours are no different, requires a huge amount of effort just to keep them fresh and so the web team have the responsibility of creating the underlying systems while the content, the stuff you see by way of information and other material, is provided by the marketing team. We have recently completed the first stage of a web regeneration project aimed at two main objectives:
1. To make our web sites easier for our members and others to use and;
2. To make it easier for our staff, primarily marketing, to publish news and information on the web – thus keeping it fresh and interesting for users.
Peter Martin Chief Operating Officer
This is just the first phase of this project which will continue through 2016 and into 2017 as we refresh and update all of the computer applications presented to both internal and external users.
Third but by no means last comes the core systems development team. All internal staff and all based at Scotsbridge House, this five-person team, reporting to Michael, provide the support to all of our internal users, all of the other breed societies for which we provide systems. And, because a great deal of our systems are used directly by members, external users as well. We have a complex array of computer applications supporting our members and thus our business, ranging from straightforward
accounting systems through to animal registration systems to our web applications. The remarkable thing about this team is the fact that they are also the custodians of the ‘jewel in our crown’ – and that is our data. We have tens of millions of records covering millions of cattle and it is this data that we must cherish and exploit going forward for the benefit of our members and the dairy industry in general.
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