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“We have a partnership rather than a typical supplier relationship. Unlike some of the largerplayers where its one size fits all, BIS offers something that is designed specifically for us.”Rob Dobell, Head of Information Management &Technology, NHS Confederation
The NHS Confederation is an independent membership body representing NHS management. It is made up of around 750 different organisations and over 20,000 members which include ambulance trusts, NHS foundation trusts, mental health trusts, primary care trusts and UK independent organisations that deliver services on behalf of the NHS.
The NHS Confederation has a number of goals centred on enhancing members’ knowledge and assisting their activities. The Confederation’s main aim is to help members understand complex policy agenda and provide support through publications, networking and policy guarantees. It also enables members to share best practice and benchmark their activities with one another.
Like most parts of the NHS, the Confederation has had to cope with significant growth within a short period of time. With the number of members increasing and pressure to provide vital support to NHS senior management and staff, the Confederations’ IT department has faced some tough challenges.
With tremendous change over the past five years, The NHS Confederation has expanded from 50 to over 250 staff and from a single London office to five locations throughout the UK and Europe.
To support this growth, the Confederation needed to find a cost-effective provider that not only had available space in central London to colocate up to 50 servers and support its rapid expansion but also had the technical expertise to develop and manage its complex information systems.
“We needed to move to a centralised data centre for resilience, rollout a new WAN and refresh our technology to support double the end-users without adding more IT support staff. This had to be done on an exceedingly tight budget.”Rob Dobell, Head of Information Management &Technology, NHS Confederation
The organisation had extremely demanding information management requirements such as providing reports and surveys, to internal staff and to over 20,000 NHS senior management members that make up the 750 membership bodies. There has also been an increased need to support a distributed workforce.
The NHS Confederation has mobile knowledge workers either working from home or from a wide variety of NHS locations and Confederation offices. They are under pressure not only to provide a large range of information services but also provide high levels of support.
Having won the tender against strong competition from larger players, BIS first embarked on centralising the NHS Confederation systems into BIS’ London data centre in Goswell Road. This environment now encompasses 50 servers and a MPLS WAN managed by BIS 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
BIS also worked with the NHS Confederation to design and support its complex information requirements. The BIS team managed the Confederations’ Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL based CRM system implementations. SharePoint is used to manage thousands of pages of information, with over 500,000 page views per month from the organisations Internet and Intranet sites to its 20,000 plus members. BIS ensured that there was no business risk throughout the implementation and helped improve workflow to ensure information was highly available and secure at all times.
‘In my experience some technology partners only engage once you know what you want to do. BIS is different. They have been able and willing to develop the right solution to meet our needs right from the start.”Rob Dobell, Head of Information Management &Technology, NHS Confederation
BIS has enabled remote access for staff with Citrix Secure Gateway and deliver a standard Microsoft Desktop to all remote staff. As well as supporting the large Citrix server farm, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint environment, BIS has connected all the Confederations’ offices together so all internal communication, including data, voice and video conferencing, now goes over its WAN, further reducing communications costs.
Rob was impressed with BIS’ flexibility and ability to offer additional support at business critical times. Although the NHS Confederation currently has a team of six IT staff providing routine support, the BIS service desk often acts as an overflow during busy times and as a point of escalation for all issues.
BIS has delivered a scalable solution and throughout the five years of working together, hascontinuously adapted to an incredible pace of change within the NHS Confederation.
‘We needed to find a partner that we could trust, that would understand us and support our rapid growth. We didn’t want a high maintenance supplier that took a lot of effort to manage. We haven’t had to manage BIS at all - they just deliver.”Rob Dobell, Head of Information Management &Technology, NHS Confederation
BIS has been able to oversee and manage a large number of third party suppliers. At the beginning of the contract, BIS met with all suppliers and took the time to build strong relationships with them by establishing clear areas of responsibility and centralising communication. This has left Rob and his team more time to spend on day-to-day responsibilities.
Using BIS has meant that the NHS Confederation has had access to a pool of highly skilled technical expertise that would have been cost-prohibitive for them to recruit. The Confederation has to manage its costs on an ongoing basis whilst maintaining high service levels and BIS has continually been able to deliver both.
Not only does BIS have hardcore technical skills but as owner operators of highly secure London data centres, they have given the Confederation confidence in terms of actual service delivery and system reliability.
NHS Case Study