Avon Information Management and Technology Consortium (Avon IM&T), a shared service supporting National Health Service (NHS) Bristol, NHS North Somerset and NHS South Gloucestershire, has implemented new technology to manage the increasing number and complexity of calls to its service desk.
As a result, the organisation claims that it has already seen £115,000 worth of productivity savings as it no longer relies on contract staff or has to move senior engineers away from other projects.
The consortium handles 3,000 calls every month and supports 7,000 users.
Over time, the number of calls had increased as the healthcare community was encouraged to move from a paper-based to an electronic working environment. The organisation realised that it required a more sophisticated service desk solution to replace its existing Numara Track-IT call logging system.
“LANDesk had the right mix, look and feel, and if you wanted to make changes to processes it was easy to do,” explained Jason Wallace, head of IT services at Avon IM&T. “The activity through the service has increased 40 per cent. Where LANDesk has helped is that it has identified that growth and is giving demonstrable information.”
He added that the system means more problems can be fixed remotely by service desk technicians rather than by technical engineers working on-site.
In addition, not long after procuring the solution, the consortium was approached by security firm McAfee’s lawyers, who wanted to confirm how many occurrences of its antivirus solutions the organisation had across its estate, against how many its licence permitted it to have.
“Prior to having this solution, I’d have had to send a man out in a van going to all of our sites and taking inventory of the kit. Because of the solution, we could run an asset discovery tool on our software, collate a report and send it to McAfee. It took about two or three hours, whereas previously it would have taken us weeks.”
This article made me ask more questions than provided answers or provided evidence.
How much did it cost to implement? And was it offset against the claimed savings?
Do you actually understand why your the number of calls increased or did you just accept it and put in extra resources?
The majority of the so-called evidence is generated from within the shared services industry (normally IT companies, private BPOs and consultancies). Or now thinktanks funded by shared services providers and those already sharing services (who wants to admit they are dishing-up a dead goose with taxpayer’s money?).
Professor John Seddon, an expert in service organizations with extensive experience in public sector systems says that there are two arguments for sharing services. The ‘less of a common resource' argument and the ‘efficiency through industrialisation' argument.
The former argument is ‘obvious': if you have fewer managers, IT systems, buildings etc; if you use less of some resource, it will reduce costs. But the reductions are often minor and one-off.
The second argument is ‘efficiency through industrialisation’. This argument assumes that efficiencies follow from specialisation and standardisation – resulting in the creation of ‘front' and ‘back' offices. The typical method is to simplify, standardise and then centralise, using an IT ‘solution' as the means. The problem with the industrial design is simple - it doesn't absorb variety in demand. Because of this, costs soar as the IT system has to be modified and customers ring back again and again because they can't get what they want.
Worse still once shared, costs can be locked-in by contracts, SLA agreements and other un-evidence and poor management practice.
Posted by: Howard Clark 26 Aug 2011
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