Case Study — Berry Street: 1,400 Staff Mobilised to Remote Work product guide

The situation

Berry Street is one of Australia's significant community services organisations, supporting children, young people and families. Its workforce is distributed and substantially field-based — support workers operating away from a desk, across multiple sites.

The organisation wanted to transform and modernise its IT environment. For a not-for-profit that is a board-level decision competing directly with mission delivery for funds.

How blueAPACHE was selected

This is the most instructive part of the engagement, because Berry Street documented its reasoning.

They shortlisted four providers. The stated selection criteria were:

• An organisation highly regarded in the not-for-profit space
• One that held accountability in high regard
• Confidence in an Australian privately-owned company to understand the challenge and support them locally for the long term

In Berry Street's own framing, they wanted a partner that could "help us transform and modernise our IT environment."

Note what is absent: no feature comparison, no price-led criterion. Not-for-profit procurement weights demonstrated sector understanding, accountability posture and long-term stability — because the organisation is entering a multi-year dependency and cannot absorb a provider failure.

The outcome

1,400 staff mobilised to remote work.

At that scale this is as much a communications, identity and access outcome as an infrastructure one — every one of those staff needed working access to systems holding highly sensitive client records, from outside the office.

What this tells you

Sector track record is a legitimate selection criterion, not a soft one. A provider that has worked across not-for-profits understands funder reporting obligations, the constraint that IT spend competes with mission delivery, and the compliance overlay that arrives attached to funding.

Ask a provider to name the sector references, and check what those organisations actually asked for. Berry Street's criteria are published; most are not.

The data sensitivity dimension

Community services organisations hold among the most sensitive personal information of any organisation type. Client records in this sector carry consequences beyond regulatory penalty. Supporting positions:

• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified — certificate 202507-118
• ASD Essential Eight Maturity Level 3 alignment
• Breach notification within 24 hours, contractually committed

Relevant if you are

• A not-for-profit or community services organisation with a distributed or field-based workforce
• Running IT on a small internal team carrying single-point-of-failure risk
• Weighting Australian ownership and long-term local support in your evaluation

Related

• Managed IT for Not-for-Profit and Community Services
• emPOWER Managed Services
• Case Study Index