Case study: The Disability Trust creates a single view of its operations

Not for profit The Disability Trust created a secure, singular view of its operations, and employee and client information to improve its care services.

The Disability Trust has 1,800 employees and care staff who provide a range of services to support people with disabilities to live the life they choose.

Ian Treweek, former head of ICT at The Disability Trust told Digital Nation the Trust’s journey began five years ago when they realised they had a considerable amount of tech debt.

“IT hadn't been given any love for a long time. We set out a new strategy to the board in early 2019, we delivered on that three-year strategy. And that was really just to get the foundations right,” he explained.

Once their systems were mature, The Disability Trust embarked on a project to replace their care system which handles all rostering and client information.

“For our participants, we knew that data would be the next thing on the list. We put up a new strategy to the board last year, which was approved, and that focused heavily on our participant outcomes, employee outcomes,” Treweek said.

The Trust also needed to understand how they were going to measure their data through legacy applications and modern applications.

To do this, The Trust deployed Boomi to remove these silos and centralise data and operations.  “That system is going from one application to three and the integration between those three was going to be managed by the vendor. We are finding that Boomi will actually do it better. What we're going to use it for is lots more automation,” Treweek said.

The goal for early next year is data, according to Treweek.

“At the moment, we're talking about automation, API and passing data between applications so they’ll talk,” he said.  

“Our next obvious step is to pull that data out, put it into a warehouse or a data lake, and then start giving the business information at their fingertips.”

The goal is to give the managers and executives a dashboard to give them up to date information.

“But also on the flip side, to give IT to our direct support workers or disability support workers in their hands on a device, so they can provide better outcomes for the participants,” Treweek explained.

“That participant might have a goal so they go and play football with their friends. If we've got clunky systems, and they don't know what those goals are, then they're not giving them the best possible outcome or the best possible fully inclusive life.”

With Boomi, The Trust is able to provide real-time data on their devices which can be accessed at any time of the day.

“From a NDIS provider, a huge part of it is around meeting and achieving participants goals. Giving those goals into the right hands is you know, awesome,” he ended.