Arts Victoria (AV) is to roll out a new grants management system to help it distribute $30 million in funding to arts and cultural projects.
The new system will replace AV’s custom-built ARGO management system based on Microsoft Visual Fox Pro, first installed in 1996. The ARGO system is used by about 50 staff, who must manually enter data and process and approve grant submissions.
According to tender documents, the ARGO system is unable to support the organisation’s requirement of a system capable of managing the full grants lifecycle.
The organisation is also seeking greater efficiency through a new system capable of handling online grants applications and reports as well as integration with other business systems such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, TRIM, a website content management system (CMS) and Oracle.
The new system, likely to be based on Microsoft ASP.NET and SQL Server, will also facilitate collaboration and communication between both AV and those applying for grants.
The project will see a data migration component involving around application 22,000 records and 6385 client records.
It will also be hosted at a data centre owned by AV’s current networking and communications supplier, CenITex, and connected to Arts Victoria offices via a 100MBit WAN link.