OUR TECHNOLOGY

During 2020, Sea Rescue was severely tested to continue operations as normal due to COVID-19 and the short turnaround time from the announcement of lockdown to implementation. The Information Technology team had to virtualise the call centre operations in less than a week, to enable the marketers to continue working from home. By using a Voice over IP solution called 3CX, we were able to continue calling our donors throughout the lockdown period. We also enabled higher risk employees to continue working from home once lockdown ended.

The employees at head office were not affected as much due to the technologies we had implemented in recent years. The Microsoft Teams program was rolled out to stations shortly after the head office platform was set up and became the primary tool for collaboration within the company. Our primary database (Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM) was moved to the cloud in a previous project, which enabled the fundraisers to work remotely.

We partnered with Vodacom to provide 4G solutions to assist the affected staff members with a stable internet connection at home. The new SeaWeb incident management system, as well as CRM system for managing personnel data, has been embedded, well supported by a maturing Emergency Operations Centre.

We also took the opportunity to upgrade the call centre IT environment from legacy systems, to reduce the risk of noncompliance of our hardware and software and align the call centre with the IT changes at the head office and stations over recent years. This is in line with the vision to create a robust and easy to manage Microsoft based IT platform, with the ability to seamlessly upgrade in the future.

We have moved our physical servers into a new data centre, hosted by iSquared to have more control of our infrastructure. This move was important to secure the call centre databases and ensure that they are only accessed by a secure VPN connection.

The project to migrate the call centre database to Microsoft Dynamics 365 started in 2020 and is continuing into 2021. All processes and workflows related to the legacy databases need to be aligned, to ensure that we have database security and scalability into the future.

The move to a new head office in 2021 has taken a lot of planning to ensure we cater for IT needs in the immediate as well as the extended future. For more information on the governance of technology, please refer to page 68.