Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Technical Support Deal Cuts Computer Maintenance Costs by 25 Per Cent
Overview
Country or Region:United Kingdom
Industry:Healthcare
Customer Profile
Worcestershire Health ICT Services manages the IT infrastructure for the entire Worcestershire healthcare economy, covering 10,000 staff and managing some 6,000 devices for a highly dispersed organisation.
Business Situation
In 2006, Worcestershire was dissatisfied with its communications and collaboration infrastructure. It needed specialist support to improve services.
Solution
A Microsoft Services Premier Support agreement resolved outstanding issues, cut costs, and prepared the way for a new infrastructure for the Worcestershire healthcare economy.
Benefits
Facilitates unified communications.
Lowers total cost of ownership.
Reduces carbon footprint by 20 per cent.
Promotes knowledge transfer.
Improves customer satisfaction ratings. / “Prior to Microsoft Services Premier Support, each technician could support four personal computers a day—they now upgrade up to 20. Customer satisfaction has improved because issues are resolved faster.”
John Thornbury, Director of ICT, Worcestershire Health ICT Services
Worcestershire Health ICT Services is pioneering the adoption of new IT infrastructure in the Worcestershire healthcare economy, working in a new five-year business partnership with Microsoft, BTLynx, and Nortel. In 2006, there was widespread dissatisfaction with the communications and collaboration infrastructure because there were frequent problems with e-mail messaging. After signing a Premier Support agreement with Microsoft Services, Worcestershire has improved its service delivery planning and developed a robust technology roadmap. The organisation has cut costs—each technician managing 400 desktops instead of 200—and has reduced its carbon footprint with up to a 40 per cent cut in mileage travelled by support staff. As a result, Worcestershire, covering 10,000 staff and 6,000 devices, is now ready to pioneer further innovations in the healthcare sector and thereby improve the delivery of customer and patient care.
Situation
Worcestershire Health ICT Services supports the IT infrastructure for the health economy in Worcestershire—including the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, the Worcestershire Primary Care Trust, and the Worcestershire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust. The organisation provides critical services to 10,000 NHS staff and is responsible for 6,000 devices.
Two years ago, the organisation was experiencing severe technical challenges in managing its communication and collaboration system, especially with its authentication mechanism for e-mail messaging. John Thornbury, Director of ICT at Worcestershire Health ICT Services, says: “We were having problems with our identity management system, and communication and collaboration servers. The network was failing and users kept coming to us with complaints. It was affecting healthcare professionals across the county, including general practitioners and radiologists. They sometimes had to wait up to 12 hours to get medical results from the laboratories because they couldn’t receive e-mail messages. We couldn’t solve the problems on our own.”
Worcestershire wanted to go further than simply resolving immediate technology jams, and offered to pioneer a single infrastructure for all its public sector partners.“We had a lot of disparate technologies,” says Thornbury, “and felt the need for a much more integrated approach by using support from Microsoft together with the Connecting for Health national computer programme for IT, which gives us access to the nationwide Microsoft® Enterprise Agreement for low-cost volume licences.”
Worcestershire was also keen to improve efficiency and productivity so users could access their e-mail messages, calendar, and tasks far more effectively than before. “We needed to review our infrastructure to see how it could advance rather than impede our business,” says Thornbury. “We wanted to prepare a strategic plan to help us move forward over the next 24 months while at the same time prioritising projects according to immediate business requirements and budget.”
A further consideration was how to improve the county healthcare economy’s carbon footprint by reducing the need for technicians to travel from one part of the county to another to serve a widely dispersed team of healthcare professionals. Each technician was looking after 200 desktops, but Thornbury and his colleagues wanted to reduce the cost of routine maintenance by using a centralised systems management software product for remote control, update management, software distribution, and hardware and software inventory.
Solution
In July 2006, Worcestershire signed a Premier Support agreement with Microsoft Services for 110 proactive hours and 50 reactive hours a year, which also gave the organisation access to a lead consultant in Technical Account Manager (TAM), Nigel Crewe.
This proved a critical turning point for Worcestershire Health ICT Services, which employs 80 IT staff. Immediate priorities included on-site talk sessions, involving whiteboard exercises with engineers on subjects including Terminal Services in Windows Server, upgrading Microsoft SQL Server® 2000 database software, planning ahead for adoption of the Windows Vista® operating system and the future introduction of Microsoft System Center products. The latter are in the design phase and are not yet implemented.
“Within three months, we resolved the problems with our identity management system, and our communication and collaboration servers,” says Crewe. “We directed calls through the correct channel for support, worked on site with our customer, understood the challenges, and got engineers there working with the customer’s IT team. The main problem was to improve support and maintain the technology. We started by using the Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization model to benchmark its IT maturity and help us provide secure, reliable, cost-effective, and highly available IT services.”
Crewe has on-site review meetings with Worcestershire once a month, and also works with the team remotely to help deliver a proactive technology roadmap and create the foundation for its planned change to unified communications. Thornbury adds: “If I tried to pull all the resources together and build on the infrastructure model, I wouldn’t know where to start. Nigel makes it simple for us. The Microsoft Services team just turns up and delivers what we want.”
This ground-breaking work has meant that Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust is the first organisation in the county’s health community to implement Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005. By September 2008, this connectivity will give mobile health professionals and other NHS employees instant messaging and presence technology to locate, communicate, and share time-sensitive information with each other instantly.
The Microsoft vision of unified communications in the NHS is to give information workers the ability to access all their information and messages from any device, at any location. Rather than having a mobile and a landline phone number, an e-mail address and countless other ways for colleagues to get in touch, unified communications mean having a single identity and using technology to decide the best medium to use at any given time.
Thornbury says: “As part of the Premier Support agreement, we’ve had a number of reviews to identify any gaps that might cause problems with the rollout of unified communications. Now we have the phone system from Nortel in place, and we’ll use Premier Support to provide us with the expertise in configuring the systems, knowledge transfer to our technical people, and for cost cutting.”
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner BT Lynx provides broadband services to the NHS. It is also involved in introducing technology that unifies voice, data, and messaging. BT Lynx has been chosen by Microsoft as one of six partners in the United Kingdom to take part in the national systems integrator programme for unified communications. This is based on BT Lynx’s expertise in delivering expert solutions based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Live OfficeCommunications Server to deliver unified messaging and collaboration with integration into IP telephony or PBX systems.
Benefits
Microsoft Services provides key technical support for Worcestershire healthcare professionals, helping them to connect to a single community of interest network to share information and data almost instantly, at any time. In just two years, Worcestershire has used its Premier Support agreement to evolve a robust technology roadmap and support better patient care. Microsoft Services has helped ensure effective knowledge transfer and reduce the carbon footprint of an organisation that serves a highly dispersed rural and urban population.
Premier Support Lays the Ground for Unified Communications
Worcestershire’s Premier Support agreement is a key driver behind the healthcare community’s ambition to implement unified communications. The project starts with the Acute Trust, and then involves the Primary Care Trust and the Mental Health Partnership Trust. Crewe says: “They would not have taken this big step 12 months ago without Premier Support. The need for it was identified through the service delivery plan. They arranged the funding and chose to work with BT Lynx and Nortel. Our role was to encourage them to deploy this project by telling them how it would help deliver end-to-end voice, data networking, and messaging solutions across the network.”
This technology will mean that, at any time, employees can see if a person is available. If the person isn’t available, it is possible to access his or her diary and make an appointment. Worcestershire sees this as a way of encouraging collaboration and fostering the creation of multi-disciplinary teams. Thornbury says: “The new communications environment from Microsoft, BT Lynx, and Nortel offers a complete package that will streamline the way we operate and improve the way patient care is delivered. For example, mobile healthcare professionals, such as district and community nurses, will be able to locate and exchange information almost instantly. This, together with the elimination of wasted travelling time, will contribute to improved productivity."
Efficiency Savings Deliver 25 Per Cent Lower Total Cost of Ownership
The NHS is leading the U.K. public sector in generating efficiency savings, and Worcestershire is playing its part. “We reduced the cost of maintaining personal computers by about 10 per cent in the first six months of our Premier Support agreement,” says Thornbury. Crewe adds that these costs were previously running at up to £600 a year for a single desktop, but through the infrastructure optimisation model these costs have been rationalised, releasing more money for improvements in patient care.
Microsoft Support Helps Shrink NHS Carbon Footprint
As the biggest single organisation in the U.K. and one of the largest employers in the world, the NHS must use its immense capacity and buying power to lead the way in reducing carbon emissions and demands on the environment. Worcestershire is no exception.
Since signing its Premier Support agreement, the organisation has cut costs with each technician now managing 400 desktops instead of just 200. It has reduced its carbon footprint by 20 per cent. Thornbury says: “Prior to Microsoft Services Premier Support, each technician could support four personal computers a day—they now upgrade up to 20. Customer satisfaction has improved because issues are resolved faster. Instead of having 25 technicians travelling to every place, we have just one van to deliver personal computers and users can ‘plug and play’ without needing individual attention. To reduce our carbon footprint further we are looking at using Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization.”
This product dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership for managing the applications on which organisations depend. It does this by transforming applications into virtualised, network-available services that are not installed on users’ computers. Instead, they are automatically delivered as people need them.
Knowledge Transfer Benefits In-House IT Support Team
One of the key objectives of the Premier Support agreement is to transfer knowledge into an organisation. Worcestershire has used its proactive hours for “chalk and talk” knowledge transfer sessions from a Microsoft dedicated support engineer. Thornbury says: “One of my senior engineers says he would rather attend the Microsoft Services Premier Support sessions than the other training courses available on the market. Microsoft people have more in-depth knowledge and we can ask questions. They know exactly what we are talking about and help guide us. Training takes less time, is more cost effective, and improves our technical skills.”
Technical Account Manager Improves Customer Satisfaction
When the Premier Support agreement started, Worcestershire was far from happy about its IT support, but, in less than two years, the mood has changed for the better. Crewe says: “During the past 12 months we’ve worked very hard to improve the service we are delivering. In January 2008, we achieved our first ‘very satisfied’ rating, which meant we were making a difference. The partnership that’s been developed has helped us to move forward very quickly.”
Microsoft Services
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