Pobal still fostering effective partnerships
By Leslie Faughnan
Pobal is a state agency that aims to engage communities in the development process at local level by supporting partnership approaches to decision-making. It promotes coordination between communities, state agencies and other stakeholders. Established in 1992 as Area Development Management, it was renamed Pobal in 2005. More than 170 staff in six locations around the country depend on a set of computer systems based in two physical locations in Dublin, backed by the government virtual private network (VPN).
“After very careful research we went for a new virtualised infrastructure in 2007,” said ICT manager Noel Galligan.
“The data centre project was accomplished in just six weeks with no downtime, working with Morse as our tender-winning project consultants. We have only three IT people but Morse had the experience and the project was carefully planned.”
Pobal had virtualised more than 95 per cent of its systems, Galligan said.
“Our mantra was to do it all and do it right.
“We now have a resilient infrastructure and set of systems that are well set up to serve the business and changes as they come along.”
All Pobal data sits on the data centre and the majority of users are served by a virtual desktop infrastructure with a mix of PCs, laptops and dumb terminals.
“There are over 20 people on one floor with just terminals – and the performance, costs and so on are very good,’’ Galligan said.
The next stage will see Pobal move almost completely to virtual desktops and Microsoft Sharepoint as its common software platform for al l services to users.
