In the job for barely two years, Jennings has recently concluded a review of the charity's systems, aided by the U.K. arm of Gartner. Sitting in his cramped office, with its faded carpets and timeworn furniture, Jennings is unabashed about spending donors' dollars on IT consultants. Spending on fund-raising and administration totals just 14 percent of Oxfam's total income, and there's scope to reduce this even further, he reckons. Indeed, there are some obvious targets. For example, Oxfam uses PeopleSoft financials and supply chain planning, but not PeopleSoft human resource management, which is handled by a smaller application that covers the U.K.-based staff.
Financial control is another potential weak spot.
As a recipient of donations from the general public as well as government, European Union and United Nations agencies, Oxfam needs to be able to prove that funds allocated to, say, Kosovo or El Salvador were actually spent on relief work in Kosovo or El Salvador. Field workers with laptop computers and satellite phones, for example, must upload their transactions as an Excel spreadsheet. Most important, any potential solution must not only meet the needs of the people on the ground, but it must do so without incurring charges of profligacy. Jennings will never forget, he says, a conversation with an Oxfam relief worker in Mali who was conserving money by deliberately minimizing the use of dial-up links and satellite phones in order to provide additional donkeys for an irrigation project. A decision to migrate to a browser-based enterprise system looks set to please both Oxfam's accountants and its relief workers.