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Chapter Arts Centre

www.chapter.org

Chapter is an educational charity and limited company located in Cardiff and specialising in contemporary culture including cinema, visual arts, digital arts and performing arts. Chapter was incorporated and opened to the public in 1971. Chapter has an annual budget of £1.8m, manages over 80,000 square feet of premises, has over 50 tenants and offers the public over 2,000 events a year. Chapter currently employs 39 staff, plus a large number of part-time and casual staff with over 100 employees on the payroll.

The consultancy provided included three main elements:

1. Review the current hardware assets of the organisation and their suitability for purpose.

2. To see whether its different software applications can be effectively integrated or supplemented in a cost effective way.

3. To discuss the systems with users to see if training or other support would increase the organisation’s efficiency.

Box office and ticketing, bar & cafe tills, event management, accounting, office systems, email & internet and hardware and communication infrastructure.

Chapter has installed a small network running a variety of applications and is representative of a series of historic decisions taken over a 10 year period. Much of the information gathered by one application cannot be easily be shared by another application; staff have to create manual work-a-rounds to find information they need. Also while there has been a process of replacement , there are parts of the hardware reaching the end of their effective life. Chapter required an external review of its IT systems.

Following detailed discussions with a cross section of users within Chapter, Microguide produced an IT Systems Review in the form of an action plan. The action plan was organised into high priority, medium priority and other observations. For each of the highlighted issues the current status was documented, a recommendation made on the suggested way forward and an estimate provided on the likely order of costs involved. 

“Microguide produced a practical action plan which allowed us to prepare a realistic budget for our future IT requirements”
Janek Alexander, Director

Microguide Corporate Computer Consultants, 82 Shortlands Road, Kingston-upon-Thames, KT2 6HE

Tel: 020 8549 7152

Fax: 020 8549 8112

Email:enquiry@microguide.co.uk

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