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Guide dogs lead the way

Matching guide dogs with owners' needs is made easier with the 
implementation of a new system. John Lamb finds out how it works

Wednesday April 21, 2004
<http://www.guardian.co.uk>The Guardian

David Blunkett and Sadie are a familiar sight in the House of Commons - the 
home secretary is one of 5,000 blind people in Britain who get around with 
the help of a dog supplied by the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.

Rearing, training and looking after dogs such as Sadie is a lengthy and 
expensive business. Each dog costs £35,000 on average and a guide dog owner 
may have as many as six or seven animals in their lifetime.

Guide Dogs for the Blind keeps records of each dog's parentage, appearance, 
temperament and health, together with details about clients it has been 
with and assessments of its performance as a guide dog by trainers and 
instructors. The information is stored on 15-year-old Informix database 
systems.

Matching dogs with owners and their lifestyles can be an intricate 
business. For example, someone who flies frequently will want a dog that is 
at home in airports. If a potential owner sings in a choir, they will want 
to be sure that the dog does not join in too.

However, until recently the 1,200 people who work for Guide Dogs for the 
Blind in its 18 UK centres were reluctant to access this type of 
information because they found the Informix systems hard-going. Each 
department had its own records, but they were not readily available to 
workers elsewhere in the organisation.

Staff had to telephone one another for the latest update. "Our bespoke 
legacy systems, even though they are data-rich, do not offer a 
user-friendly interface, and our operational staff found these systems 
difficult to use, so they didn't use them," says Paulyne Morgan, 
information systems manager.

Guide Dogs for the Blind bought web software that copies "live" data from 
its existing systems into a SQL data warehouse that can be assessed via a 
browser over the organisation's internal network.

Staff and volunteers now extract information from the portal, called Guide 
Dogs Interactive, using drop-down menus and mouse clicks. "If one of our 
senior managers wanted information on the siblings of a particular dog they 
would normally have to phone around each centre, a job that could take 
about one and a half hours instead of five minutes using Guide Dogs 
Interactive," says Morgan.

Trainers and managers each have a "My Dogs" desktop that gives them access 
to details of the dogs they are responsible for. By enabling staff to get 
at information quickly, Guide Dogs for the Blind has been able to improve 
its service to clients. For example, faster decision-making means that, 
when a dog retires, a replacement is available immediately and that the new 
dog will be a better match with its owner than was previously possible.

The new system is also more accessible to visually impaired staff. Civica, 
the company that supplied Guide Dogs Interactive, customised the software 
to enable blind people to use reader programs such as Jaws that generate 
spoken versions of what is on screen. Guide Dogs for the Blind plans to 
extend the portal to cover other aspects of its work including fundraising, 
finance, volunteering and client services.

Guide Dogs for the Blind: <http://www.guidedogs.com/>www.guidedogs.com/




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