Case study: SSI expands its digital presence

Community organisation Settlement Services International (SSI) has expanded its digital presence to help people settle in Australia.

David Aitken, group business application manager at SSI spoke with Digital Nation about its expansion and how it improved its standardisation processes.

Aitken said they experienced rapid growth and their systems couldn’t keep up.

“We had different programs using different systems, and rushing to build systems based on the short timelines that they had to get set up rather than taking a step back and strategically consolidating customer data all on one platform,” he said.

SSI consolidated the handful of platforms they had to invest in best-of-class technology.

Aitken said, “[We moved] from using the small players in the non-profit space who do case management solution sometimes, but then don't have the investment to keep them as good as they could be going forward.”

From selecting Salesforce, they have improved their standardisation processes.

Aitken said SSI is a geographically dispersed team so having the right processes in place can create better efficiencies within the business’s day to day.

He said, “We're also seeing an uptake in the data literacy within the teams. There's another project attached around dashboarding and things which is improving our ability to use data now that we have more reliable data to use and improve performance there.”

Aitken said they have able to dramatically improve the performance of our employment programs.

“Using some of this data combined with the business insights, people in the business understand that program,” he explained.

“That is the key thing there, it is giving the people understanding on how these highly complicated programs work, the complicated data and the right format for them to help them drive their decisions.”

For the rest of the year, SSI is working on launching new programs and integrating them more seamlessly within the finance and HR departments.

“It's also just moving from a project-based approach to more of an operational basis. Moving to that operational footing where we were doing the continuous investment rather than big bang projects as the other big change there and setting in place the governance to make that work,” Aitken ended.