IT framework saves hospital £100,000 per year

Dublin-based Beaumont Hospital is saving between £100,000 and £200,000 a year as a result of implementing the IVI IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF).

Beaumont's CIO, Martin McCormack, said: "CIOs generally struggle to answer how much value their IT investments will deliver. But this framework has helped us to benchmark the hospital's capability against private industry best practice," he said.

The framework was established by a consortium of global technology organisations and academia, and it consists of a five-stage maturity model used to map IT developments.

The more mature a process is, the more successful it will be for the business. The IT-CMF is able to assess 36 core processes that aim to cover all the potential activities in an IT department.

The hospital had to work hard to implement the framework, though.

McCormack said: "Following the initial self-assessment using the framework, we realised we had failed to properly track the benefits of many of our projects and programmes.

"For example, our innovation management (one of the 36 processes) was not working as it should. The assessment showed that 97 per cent of our effort was focused on keeping things running," he added.

"Building benefit assessment and innovation management into our project management lifecycle by constantly assessing maturity levels helped us to prioritise projects and take 40 per cent out of our cost base.

"Identifying maturity levels for IT processes helped us restructure our staffing arrangements and reduce costs. In fact, we have been able to cut 30 per cent of our IT workforce," said McCormack.

"We recently assessed our print and scanning functions, and realised that 70 per cent of our IT helpdesk requests were to report printers not working. We needed to sort out this problem," he explained.

"So we have outsourced that function and are letting somebody else manage it. As a result you release resources back into the organisation."

The framework allows us to look at all the IT processes across the business, identify areas that are mature, identify those you don't need to spend any more time on, and really drill down into what needs doing," said McCormack.

"The beauty of it is that we can release these funds back into the hospital, and then the business can decide whether it will put this back into IT, or get more value by using it on critical frontline services," he said.