Back in 2004 the Office of Government Commerce signed a massive deal with Microsoft to provide all desktop software within the NHS. This followed some very high-level lobbying from both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer when it looked like the health service might ditch Microsoft from desktop PCs.

But the NHS enterprise agreement has now been scrapped. A message on the relevant page of the Microsoft website says: “We are currently updating these pages to reflect new licensing information as of May 2010. Please check back shortly.”

The nine year deal was signed by Richard Granger back in 2004 and was worth £500m. It had break points every three years. It was meant to provide major savings for the health service – £300m over the full nine years.

Microsoft also promised “a health specific user interface for clinical systems” and to spend £40m in R&D.

Granger got such a good deal in part by publicly threatening to move the NHS to Sun’s Java desktop software. Shortly after that Bill Gates arrived to negotiate directly with Granger, visit the Department of Health and pick up a knighthood. We reported the shenanigans at the time here.

One source at a PCT who asked for anonymity said documents they had seen estimated the extra cost for a medium-sized trust at between £100,000 and £150,000 for software licensing alone.

There are 151 PCTs in England with Wales and Scotland run separately. There are also mental health trusts, care trusts, GP surgeries and other organisations – the NHS employs over a million people in total.

Apart from extra licensing costs there will also be a massive management problem. The previous agreement allowed some leeway in counting individual machines for licenses.

Without a new agreement every NHS organisations will be looking at expensive hardware audits of all their various offices, labs and surgeries. The original deal was good for up to 900,000 desktop machines, at the time the NHS had approximately 500,000 machines.

Our source said the only alternative – a move to open source software – was unlikely to overcome reluctance from staff to move to less familiar systems.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said:

The bottom line is that the NHS uses £270m of Microsoft software and pays less than £65m per year for it. For the next three years the cost would have risen to £85m as the NHS deploys more and more technology while the National Programme rolls out.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “The Department of Health has already invested so that NHS Trusts are able to have access to the latest versions of Microsoft desktop software. Future investment decisions will be taken at a local level in line with the proposals set out in the White Paper published this week.”

Source: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/07/15/nhs_microsoft/

Unless you’ve already got your enterprise cals, Sharepoint 2010 projects in the NHS just became whole lot more expensive !

The government has scrapped the long-running NHS Connecting for Health (CfH) enterprise agreement (EA) software licensing deal with Microsoft after deciding there was no business case or budget to renew it.

The EA, which was scheduled to kick off on 1 July, had already been pared back from the original value of £80m to just £21m, and was set to run for three years through Microsoft large account resellers Softcat, Trustmarque and Phoenix Software.

However, sources said that at the eleventh hour the Cabinet Office pulled the plug on the EA, which was originally agreed in 2004 for a total of nine years, including three-year breakpoints to allow the NHS to review its application requirements.

“Out of the blue, the Cabinet Office rejected the cut-down version of the renewal,” said a source. “The noise from the top is that they are not sure national agreements work. It will be down to the trusts to make sure they are fully licensed.”

The EA covered about 800,000 desktops in all NHS regions in England, and was believed to be the biggest deal of its kind in the world.

The Cabinet Office did agree to pay Microsoft about £50m to cover software used in the previous agreement that was not licensed, but attributed the spend to the last administration’s budget.

“The money is coming out of the same pot but, politically and on paper, it looks like the new government is saying it has not spent any money as the last lot used it all,” said another insider.

But others have questioned the value of the EA. “The NHS was given a free lunch that it didn’t order – was the deal any good if certain entities were not using the software?” said another source. “It makes sense for those using the software to buy it.”

Software prices are expected to rise two to three times without the economies of scale that an EA agreement would provide, but the decision will also lead to massive licence compliancy issues, according to sources close to Microsoft.

“There are around 400 NHS trusts in the UK and although they are licensed for some elements, there is a big hole out there that could be as large as £100m,” added the source.

Microsoft is beginning the process of knocking on trusts’ doors to ascertain the software under use and now much of it has been paid for.

The move has put a further question mark over the future of CfH, which had agreed the deal with Microsoft. CfH was created to oversee the £12bn NHS National Programme for IT, but that troubled initiative is also under review.

Only last week, the government met the largest suppliers to the public sector to ask them to cut profit margins to reduce the cost of IT contracts.

Despite repeated requests, the Cabinet Office, CfH and Microsoft failed to provide comment for this story.

Source: ComputerWeekly

This is, maybe, only really going to impact new projects at the moment but futher down the line say in 3 – 5 years time trusts will be running on old technology / rickety server estates……flood gates open when they look at the new costs associated with Microsoft upgrades, some stick & some twist on open source alternatives, are we welcoming the wild wild west into NHS IT and Government IT systems as a whole?

Here is a list of some providers who can provide hosting services on the N3 (NHS) network:

BT Engage
Sungard
Ioko
Vialtis
Asckey
Intechnology

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PROCESS QUESTIONS

1. Does the process require reporting, auditing, compliance or version control?

2. Can the process be mapped? Or has the process been mapped and optimized already?

3. Is this process in operation today, electronically, in paper or otherwise?

4. If the business process is new to the business, have the necessary participants of the process been informed and involved in the change management and business improvement exercise?

5. Do you have a paper forms and folders that are passed around?

6. Is this process time sensitive? Are there service level agreements? Do you need escalation points when specific time limits are reached based on your SLAs?

7. Do you have a business process that requires more than one type of review or decision at the same time?

8. Does the process share information with any other process?

9. Does the process run for a long time?

PEOPLE QUESTIONS

1. Will tasks need to be performed on behalf of another person?

2. Will the process involve the participation of the entire organization?

3. Are the process participants geographically dispersed?

4. Does the process need to escalate if someone fails to action it?

5. Do multiple people need to review and sign this off?

6. Are external parties involved in the process, for example regulatory agencies, customers and partners?

7. Is it important to notify users of process status?

8. Is overall process visibility important, for example for employees, managers, executives or auditors?

9. Do you need visibility into your process, like who is doing what and how long does tasks take to complete?

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Card sorting is a technique that many information architects (and related professionals.) use as an input to the structure of a site or product. With so many of us using the technique, why would we need to write an article on it?

While card sorting is described in a few texts and a number of sites, most descriptions are brief. There is not a definitive article that describes the technique and its variants and explains the issues to watch out for. Given the number of questions posted to discussion groups, and discussions we have had at conferences, we thought it was time to get all of the issues in one place.

This article provides a detailed description of the basic technique, with some focus on using the technique for more complex sites. This article does not cover some issues such as the use of online tools, which will be covered in a future article.

Read more…….

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide

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This guidance helps healthcare organisations apply a chosen information architecture or taxonomy within a 2007 Office system environment. Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Information Architecture describes how to plan and design an information architecture and provides step-by-step instructions showing how to configure Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 with these settings.

This guidance is suitable for use by healthcare organisations that currently:

- Have content stored in local drives and file shares
- Archive records manually
- Have a basic Web server with Web master-controlled publishing
- Have not yet deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007, or have recently deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007 and wish to plan a portal structure and information architecture

Solution Accelerator – Scorecards

This solution accelerator acts as a template for configuring a management dashboard to track organisational metrics. It contains four example dashboards ranging from a primary care practice to a healthcare organisation’s CEO dashboard with metrics based on the healthcare targets for 2008. The solution accelerator also includes online guidance explaining how to customise a dashboard for a healthcare organisation’s needs.

This solution accelerator is suitable for use by healthcare organisations that currently use :

- Static paper-based documents to track performance with manually-entered performance metrics

- Static, decentralized, and highly-IT dependent reports

- Standalone spreadsheet-based analysis

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A recent study conducted by ioko for a typical NHS Trust indicated that over half the respondents found it difficult to find information and could not be sure they were using the latest version of the document. 32% indicated that they spent between 2 to 5 hours or more per week searching for information.

You do the maths !!

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