Challenge

Central Queensland Indigenous Development are an NGO providing critical social services to Indigenous Australians across central and western Queensland. Operating from eight widely spaced sites the organisation was experiencing a separation between their goals, their incumbent service provider’s service levels, and their available technology. The main Rockhampton site was impeded by its location and was attempting to share a 2/2 adsl internet connection between 50 team members. Infrastructure was poorly controlled with wide age and software discrepancies across networking devices and the fleet of user devices. Support services were reactive with a standard delay of many hours or days between a request for service being placed and the onsite response.

Solution

When Digital Dexterity were approached for assistance our immediate focus was twofold – connectivity and support. With major communications carriers unable to commit services to the primary site we designed and managed a project to create a fibre link. This project included civil engineering and a long fibre cable run to the closest distribution pit. Along with upgraded networking this service ultimately provided 100/100 uncontested data transfer capability.
To provide an elevated support level, and to re-engage the CQID team, we placed a member of our technical team onsite in Rockhampton. This was a popular move and became an ongoing engagement; members of our technical team are now onsite five days a week.

Outcomes

The improvement in data connectivity and the constantly available onsite support allowed the CQID team to gain confidence and knowledge in their technology use and through this interaction the Digital Dexterity technical team were able to plan improvements across the eight sites to bring conformity of experience for the whole team. Through a staged transition, core networking and user devices were upgraded across and eighteen-month period. Further improvements include new organisation wide telephony and the implementation of cloud services, the ability to work remotely and the addition of video conferencing facilities to reduce isolation in remote teams.