Wavelength - Issue #6, April 2010

MEET: Karen Barsamian

Committed to IT

“It’s been incredible”, said Karen Barsamian, Project Manager and Service Manager in Mozambique. “The uniqueness and complexity of the One UN project makes it very exciting.”

Karen, originally from Armenia, has been with World Food Programme (WFP) for over 10 years. Prior to joining the Organization, he was Head of the Telecommunications unit of the ‘Spitak’ Search and Rescue Team for the Armenian Red Cross. With nearly two decades of IT experience in the humanitarian sector, Karen is no stranger to large-scale ICT projects.

“I believe this is the first time that so many United Nations Agencies have decided to join their internal networks together. By doing this, we are able to provide common ICT services on a much larger scale including telecommuting and information sharing. We are also able to offer services which some individual agencies would not be able to obtain on their own, e.g. contingency IT site.”

Karen says that another highlight of One UN is the number of people involved in the project design and implementation.

“The project involves not only the ICT unit of WFP Mozambique, but also staff from other agencies’ headquarters, regional offices, legal departments, IT staff from country offices, technicians from private companies and many more!”

“The levels of people involved range from technicians up to top management. Coordinating all these efforts is quite a task, but also very rewarding.”

“The main focus of the project is to establish a platform for common services provision.  All required connectivity is finalised and all planned services are being delivered to the customer agencies. The plan for the next 12 months is to develop, prepare and move new services into production, such as Common Help-Desk, Voice over IP services, advanced collaboration tools. User training is also crucial — there is no point in deploying a sophisticated system if users cannot utilise it properly!”

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