EHSS takes an open view

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Eastern Health Shared Services (EHSS) provides a wide range of professional, business and technical support services to the Eastern Regional Health Authority and the three area health boards in the Eastern Region. The ICT function within EHSS is the largest provider of technology services to heathcare in the country managing over 100 systems and a wide area network made up of 260 networks

Carroll and his team wanted to retain management over the 120 servers even though they were moving off sitethis meant a reliable management platform would have to be procured. ‘We felt OpenView fitted our strategy,’ says Carroll. ‘We were using HP as our server platform, we were moving to a HP facility so we got a good offer from HP for an end to end solution.’

‘Having a single vendor adds to the attraction and gives additional comfort,’ says Pat Thornton, IT Manager for Operations and Support with EHSS. ‘We had developed a good understanding with them over the last four years.’

As a result of implementing OpenView the IT department now has access to data and reports that it never had before. This is particularly valuable as a shared services organisation as it is now able to back up its service level agreements (SLA’s) with accurate information pulled from OpenView. ‘For a shared services organisation SLA’s are extremely important,’ says Carroll. ‘We need that level of accuracy for our customers because it’s on that basis that they will be paying for the service they receive.’

From an IT perspective OpenView provides much improved incident reporting and enables staff to be more proactive than when the servers were located on site and managed manually. The reporting features mean that IT staff can get trends, history and analysis of system performanceall of which feeds back into the SLAs.

Staff have been extremely supportive of the new hosting arrangement and implementation of systems-management software. ‘Our server management and network people will all get OpenView accredition,’ says Carroll. ‘They are doing the same things as before but differently and with tools that enable them to do it better.’

‘Going forward we see this as providing a model for how to deliver services nationally,’ says Carroll. ‘It’s a strategic alliance with HP but our people still manage the systems. A lot of shared services organisations are into full outsourcing but the edge is our own people know the business of healthcare.’

19/04/04

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