Ibec is Ireland’s largest lobby and business representative group. Their purpose is to help build a better, sustainable future by influencing, supporting, and delivering for business success. With over 230 employees, Ibec engages with key stakeholders in Ireland and internationally through their six regional offices and their Brussels office, along with an extensive international network in the UK and US.
Ibec positions are shaped by their diverse membership, which range from small to large, domestic to multinational and their 38 trade associations cover a wide range of industry sectors. Ibec members employ over 70% of the private sector workforce in Ireland.
As well as lobbying, Ibec provides a wide range of professional services and management training to members on all aspects of human resource management, occupational health and safety, employee relations and employment law.
As Ireland’s largest lobby and business representative group, to stay competitive, Ibec needed to migrate to a scalable, flexible, and secure platform to manage the ever-increasing amounts of data and data sources of its members.
With Spanish Point as their partners, Ibec engaged in a Business Value Assessment program that resulted in a prioritised roadmap for business solution migrations to Microsoft’s integrated Cloud-based platform.
Spanish Point’s architects and software developers designed and built a solution that gave Ibec the opportunity to take advantage of the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform as well as the Microsoft 365 platform. Ibec now leverages Azure to scale their processing capacity as they need it, including:
- A single sign-on experience for employees.
- The hosting of their public and members websites
- A Disaster Recover (DR) service for several business solutions.
- An integration platform between the core back-office ERP system and other components such as Exchange and CMS.
Spanish Point also designed a modern intranet utilising Microsoft 365 ensuring all Ibec employees remain informed and connected with a go-to point for formal, informal, and social news that is available from their desktop or mobile devices. This intranet also houses Ibec’s knowledge hub a system envisaged to capture and retain corporate knowledge and one that houses a vast array of employment, legal, economic and policy information that has a search and discovery, and that was configured and optimised by Spanish Point to support efficient finding of documents. The system also manages the life cycle of different types of documents by ensuring tight governance around the holding data beyond specific time periods together with appropriate access controls.