Heritage Lottery Fund

From museums, parks and historic places to archaeology, natural environment and cultural traditions, the Heritage Lottery Fund invests in every part of the UK’s heritage. The Heritage Lottery Fund has supported more than 30,000 projects, allocating £4.5billion across the UK.

The Problem

The Heritage Lottery Fund wanted to move away from using paper-base application forms that were expensive and inefficient to administer, the cumulative effect being to provide a less than satisfactory service to applicants for Lottery funding.

In addition, it was difficult to audit claims and track how effectively the grants were being used. Grants ranged from £3,000 to over £5,000,000 and accountability is of paramount important to the Fund.

The Heritage Lottery Fund was convinced that the solution they needed would be a web-based one, but when detailed implementation planning took place they realised that the corporate legacy network would not provide the bandwidth at suitable price or performance points needed to support this strategic move.

In addition to providing a web-based application process, all 10 regional offices would be able to access digitized archived records held centrally in London. It was therefore critically important that not only would sufficient performance be delivered by the network, but should there be a problem with the network, access to the central digital archives could still be maintained from all 10 regional sites.

The Solution

Freedom implemented a two-phase project to help The Heritage Lottery Fund meet their business objectives.

Phase 1

We implemented a ‘Cloud-based’ MPLS solution that delivered 2Mbps to the regional offices at more cost effective price points than previously. In addition we provided a 10Mbps Ethernet connection from the MPLS Cloud into the Head Office in London and internet access was also provided via the Cloud to improve network efficiency. Failover access from the remote sites to the London head office was provided by ADSL circuits.

Phase 2

While the initial implementation offered significant cost savings and performance benefits over the previous legacy network, phase two of this project provided another layer of redundancy for mission-critical services, increased network performance to each remote site and quintupled the bandwidth to each remote site while keeping the budgets well and truly under control.

We augmented remote site connectivity using 10Mbps Ethernet circuits and reallocated the 2Mbs circuits as primary failover routes. We then put in place QoSenabled PADSL (Private ADSL) as tertiary failover circuits, resulting in a very cost and operationally effective network. To futureproof the business for the increase traffic to and from the central London site we increased the bandwidth to 100MBps from the MPLS core. We also increased the bandwidth and performance for internet access with an uncontended 8Mbps connection and created an on-line portal for real-time monitoring of network health.

Benefits Experienced

From the CEO’s perspective The Heritage Lottery Fund has repositioned the company as an on-line paperless office with operational saving and increase “green” credentials. There is a more effective workforce in place that offers greater support to applicants and accountability to shareholders and the public alike. In addition to all of this, business continuity across all 11 regional locations has been assured.

The Financial Director has seen much better utilization of budgets as now the IT has been fundamental to enable the business strategy at realistic costs. While bandwidth to the regional size has increased by a facto of five, costs of bandwidth has increased only by a factor of two. In addition to this, due to Freedoms’ flexibility with contract terms, the migration from the legacy network to the new Cloud-based service was seen as cashneutral.

The IT team has been able to take advantage of modern network and connectivity technologies to deliver a technical solution that underpins and support the business. Increased resilience, increased bandwidth and vastly improved fail-over options, combined with sophisticated on-line real time and historical management reports culminates in an effective use of IT.

In the case of the Lottery Heritage Fund, there are two communities of “End User”: the employees and the applicants for funds. Employees are benefiting from more efficient communications as the network supports the web-based application process, retrieval and storage of central archives and other communications tools such as video conferencing. Applicants for funds in turn receive a vastly improved and accountable service.