Computerworld > Four-phase deployment boosts HealthAlliance service
HealthAlliance, the shared services
operation of the Counties-Manukau and Waitemata district health boards,
has deployed service management software to boost its ICT delivery.
The organisation, founded in 2000, was
seeking to control technology costs, boost service delivery and comply
with regulatory requirements around its particular service areas,
including ICT, payroll, HR, finance and other management services. Also
on the agenda were hardware tracking and software licence management.
CIO Phil Brimacombe and service delivery
team leader Alistair Mascarenhas say the HealthAlliance faced various
challenges. The helpdesk was drowning in requests and the number of PCs
was growing. HealthAlliance also found it didn’t have a handle on its
software licensing. Whatever solution was deployed, it also needed to
be able to deliver significant custom reporting capabilities.
HealthAlliance, which serves 12,000
employees and services 6,500 PCs (growing at around 500 a year) and 900
applications, provides ICT services for four hospitals, 70 community
and mental health sites and 130 dental school sites and also community
health services. More than a million people fall within the
organisation’s coverage area.
Nine hundred applications probably seems
a huge number, but as Brimacombe points out, every new piece of
biomedical equipment now comes with software.
To answer its service and management
challenges, HealthAlliance deployed various Symantec technologies in
four phases, starting with the Altiris Service and Asset Management
Suite followed by IT Analytics. The third phase saw Workflow delivered
and finally came Altiris Helpdesk.
Symantec acquired Altiris in early 2007.
A Symantec-sponsored study by US-based
consultancy Alchemy Solutions into the project, shows significant
productivity gains being achieved from the investments. Alchemy found
labour productivity gains around PC replacement activity of US$154,000
(NZ$264,000), heldesk labour productivity gains of US$859,000 (NZ$1.47
million) and gains in reporting of US$78,000 ($NZ134,000).
It also detected gains in service quality
measured through conformance with service level agreements (SLAs).
Compliance with the helpdesk SLA rose from 55% in July 2008 to 93% by
November.
Alchemy says in its report that the gains allowed HealthAlliance to reallocate IT staff to more business-critical initiatives.
Brimacombe says Symantec paid the
organisation so much attention in its case study because it was one of
the first implementations in Australasia of Altiris’s Workflow product.
He says Alchemy was very good at working with HealthAlliance on what
was to be published about the project.
“We tried to strike a balance between what was optimal and reasonable,” he says about the Alchemy paper.
Brimacombe says the demand to do more
with less is huge. He says being able to redeploy workers to higher
value work means not having to employ contractors and being able to
absorb costs within current budgets.
“What we’re trying to do is to build
information technology that enables clinicians to deliver improved
quality care through the use of information,” he says.
Boosting service levels and reaping
productivity gains were considered important not just in themselves,
but also to allow progress on strategic programmes such as electronic
health records development.
Also, the organisation wanted to deploy
ITIL (IT infrastructure libraries) to improve service delivery. Altiris
is based on ITIL, says Brimacombe.
“The helpdesk system used at the time didn’t allow us to move on,” he says.
The project was implemented on time and on budget between June 2007 and June 2008 by Bay Dynamics.
