A fully activated Microsoft 365 environment, modernized across the whole organization
Stronger security across systems, resources, and the data the Trust is entrusted with
24x7x365 infrastructure monitoring and a service desk for staff (8 AM to 8 PM ET, Monday to Friday)
Quarterly strategic reviews connecting technology decisions directly to mission planning
A mature, unified IT foundation and stronger technical skills across the entire team
As the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust marked 50 years of grantmaking, its leadership set an ambitious goal to do three things concurrently: modernize a maturing technology suite, strengthen security, and build in room to innovate. As CEO Romanita Hairston put it, “you can’t do all those things at once”, so the Trust needed the right partner to work alongside its team.
What shaped the Trust’s approach was a deeply held discipline: return as many resources as possible to the mission. That meant technology had to earn its place, not just be modern for its own sake, but be genuinely useful to the people doing the work.
ProServeIT was selected after a multi-point evaluation against three or four other managed service providers, and scored at the top across technical capability, operations, and security.
From there, ProServeIT built a model around how the Trust actually operates. Infrastructure and network monitoring runs 24x7x365. A phone-based service desk supports staff during business hours, with after-hours emergency coverage when needed. Nothing was oversized. Nothing was added just because it could be.
Quarterly managed services reviews connected every technology decision to the Trust’s broader direction. And hands-on training built technical competence across departments, so staff could apply what they were learning, right away.
Rather than tackling productivity, security, and innovation as separate projects, the Trust moved through all three as one coordinated journey. What started as modernization became a stronger, more intentional foundation for everything the Trust has coming up next.
The ecosystem of technology support grew and matured in concrete ways: additional capacity where it was needed, a clearer picture of the Trust’s technical debt, and a deliberate shift away from endpoint-by-endpoint architecture toward a single source of truth.
And the change wasn’t restricted to the IT team. ProServeIT worked to bring the whole organization along by building technical skills across staff so that technology became something everyone could use to do their jobs better, not something that slowed them down.
Three things made it work. ProServeIT topped the technical evaluation. It brought the staying power and sense of trust the Trust looks for in a long-term relationship. And it was able to engage executive leadership on strategy, not just the technical team.
