The IT system to help the world love the UK

The British Council is replacing a "plethora" of systems as part of a £27m IT infrastructure rollout in 110 countries.

The organisation, which aims to promote the UK abroad and build closer international ties, wants to reach out to millions more people and is improving IT to give staff more chances to do this.

The British Council's programme director for finance and business systems, Richard Phillips, told silicon.com: "When we started this project we had a plethora of IT systems doing different jobs. These were largely bespoke systems and over time the interfaces were becoming difficult to manage - some were becoming semi-obsolete."

The jigsaw puzzle of systems is being replaced with a £27m SAP implementation. Branches in the UK, India and last month South Africa have already gone live.

The entire project is due to be completed by March 2009, with a third of the users online already. The system will eventually cover 220 locations in 110 countries.

The finance management system is designed to help the organisation improve budgeting. For example, staff are now able to view actual spending as compared to the organisation's original plans which was not always possible on the old systems.

The original deadline of March 2008 has been delayed to give the British Council more time to find further savings - such as the use of more shared service centres for finance, Phillips said.

He said: "Anything can be done anywhere. We see this as much more than an IT project, it's a business transformation project and changing the way we manage in quite a profound way. The way we'll get many of the efficiencies is by using standardised processes and efficiencies of scale.

The British Council intends for the system to pay for itself in 10 years. Phillips said: "There are significant savings in licence costs - we had a range of licences and although there is a cost of SAP we're reducing a whole layer of other costs. We'll need fewer staff to operate these back office processes which frees up resources to put them up front in the organisation which is what we want."

Students at the British Council's teaching centres will be able to go online to book courses, access academic records and pay for courses, none of which was possible before.

Phillips added: "One of the objectives of our 2010 strategy is to reach millions more people. You can only reach so many people face to face. A key target audience for us is young people in transition economies like Russia and China, which we need to reach us by more virtual means.