The Grill: Ken Murdoch

Computerworld - Ken Murdoch's colleagues at the Save the Children Federation venture where few corporate workers go: war-torn countries, poverty-stricken regions and areas devastated by natural disasters. Yet this CIO's 30-member IT team must provide the same technologies that businesspeople in posh office buildings expect. Consider, for example, that Save the Children was one of the first nongovernmental organizations to have its networks restored and running following the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Murdoch's IT team made Skype operational again in less than 24 hours, allowing Save the Children officials to appear on news shows to provide information and appeal for aid, while the organization's remaining IT infrastructure was up in less than 72 hours. Murdoch credits his team for such successes. Here he discusses other aspects of leading Save the Children's IT operations.

How does IT support the overall mission of your organization? Our IT team is very much an integral part of the overall mission of our agency. Our main focus here is to make sure that we give our business divisions the ability to cut down the time it takes to do things, have faster responses in emergencies, and do everything we can do to support the agency's goal of creating change for children.

Save the Children works in areas where many global companies won't operate. What are the challenges you face in serving the IT needs of your colleagues in such areas? The biggest challenge is [usually when] we walk into a situation where there's very little connectivity and limited commercial power. I was in Ethiopia a year ago visiting a school at one of our education programs, and in the classroom, you're working on daylight. There are few power sources, so there's limited computation capabilities, and that's just in the regular day-to-day and not even in the emergency response mode.

What are the challenges of moving into areas following traumatic events? What are the key technologies that you rely on? In most cases, when the immediate infrastructure is disabled, we'll rely on satellite phones and BGAN units -- that's satellite communications for voice and data -- and Skype to enable the nimble and immediate communications we need. If I were to compare the situation in Japan to the one in Haiti [following the earthquakes in those countries], the approach was very different in each one. With Japan being such a technology-leading country, there were better and more available technologies to set up a quick response. But in Haiti, the infrastructure was a lot less mature, and we were forced to do more with satellite phones and satellite communications.