Innovation could be COVID’s silver lining

The pub­lic sec­tor lags far behind pri­vate enter­prise when it comes to mov­ing lega­cy IT sys­tems into the cloud, some­thing brought into stark relief by the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.

As coun­cils, police forces, schools and hos­pi­tals have faced unprece­dent­ed chal­lenges, they have had to find, imple­ment and scale solu­tions at break­neck speed.

Those still using inflex­i­ble on-premise IT sys­tems have found it hard­er to cope than their cloud-native peers. Not only is it more dif­fi­cult to buy and “plug in” new cloud solu­tions, they are also like­ly to have missed out on con­sid­er­able sav­ings gained from mov­ing to the cloud, leav­ing them with few­er finan­cial and human resources to throw at the cri­sis.

“If all your ener­gy is spent keep­ing the lights on and lim­it­ing IT fail­ures, you can’t focus on new ini­tia­tives that might trans­form your oper­a­tion,” says Rahul Gup­ta, cloud expert at PA Con­sult­ing.

The benefits of cloud in the public sector

One organ­i­sa­tion that large­ly bypassed these issues was Liv­er­pool Women’s NHS Foun­da­tion Trust, which serves more than 50,000 patients on Mersey­side and across the UK.

Work­ing with the IT dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion part­ner Fortrus, it had spent the pre­vi­ous few years mov­ing all its paper health records onto a new dig­i­talised sys­tem host­ed on Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, which enabled clin­i­cians to access patient data far more quick­ly.

Not only was this more effi­cient and secure – pre­vi­ous­ly records had to be man­u­al­ly retrieved from stor­age by a ded­i­cat­ed team – it also meant the hos­pi­tal was in a stronger posi­tion for a shock it could nev­er have fore­seen.

“With­out a dig­i­tal records sys­tem it would have been a logis­ti­cal night­mare. Instead they were able to recon­fig­ure hos­pi­tal work­flows with­out the risk of phys­i­cal paper records and porters trans­mit­ting the virus,” says Jon Atkin, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer at Fortrus.

“They could also keep reg­u­lar tabs on patients who had been sent home, but were still sick, and tack­le the cri­sis as it unfold­ed.”

In 2014, the UK gov­ern­ment made it manda­to­ry for cen­tral gov­ern­ment depart­ments to con­sid­er poten­tial cloud solu­tions before any oth­er option when procur­ing new IT ser­vices. It also strong­ly rec­om­mend­ed the pol­i­cy should be adopt­ed by the wider pub­lic sec­tor.

Why has cloud adoption been so slow?

But accord­ing to a free­dom of infor­ma­tion request by IT man­age­ment com­pa­ny Solar­Winds last year, only 30 per cent of NHS trusts had adopt­ed any lev­el of pub­lic cloud in their organ­i­sa­tion, while the fig­ure for cen­tral gov­ern­ment depart­ments was 61 per cent.

This will not have helped in 2020 as vast num­bers of pub­lic sec­tor employ­ees have start­ed work­ing from home, where they need secure remote access to cen­tralised data on var­i­ous devices. Organ­i­sa­tions have also had to scale up IT sys­tems at record speed, for exam­ple to cope with a large rise in unem­ploy­ment claims or to under­pin whol­ly new ser­vices such as COVID test­ing cen­tres.

How­ev­er, the cri­sis has suc­ceed­ed in strength­en­ing the case for change, says Gup­ta. “The pan­dem­ic has sur­faced a lot of hid­den prob­lems, but also some real game-chang­ers that peo­ple are going to want to hang on to when this is over.”

Local councils leading the way

One such suc­cess sto­ry is Haringey Coun­cil in Lon­don. Before the pan­dem­ic, it was already work­ing to improve in-per­son col­lab­o­ra­tion across the organ­i­sa­tion through its Agile plan. But in March it had to take the whole project online, a move that has uncov­ered new ways of work­ing which should out­last the pan­dem­ic. 

The coun­cil had already imple­ment­ed Microsoft 365, a cloud-based col­lab­o­ra­tion tool, so was able to move many of its staff seam­less­ly to remote-work­ing arrange­ments. It also iden­ti­fied and quick­ly imple­ment­ed a range of online tools to aid col­lab­o­ra­tion, includ­ing an online white­board with vir­tu­al post-it notes, an online polling tool to cap­ture feed­back and pref­er­ences in real time, and the vir­tu­al meet­ings app Microsoft Teams.

“Being able to adapt our Agile approach in this way helped the coun­cil to respond in the ear­ly stages of the pan­dem­ic by run­ning vir­tu­al work­shops with groups of staff, res­i­dents and com­mu­ni­ties to under­stand the impact COVID-19 was hav­ing on our com­mu­ni­ties,” says Andrew Ros­tom, head of pro­grammes and trans­for­ma­tion at Haringey Coun­cil.

“Staff have also been able to meet up, share data, col­lab­o­rate and learn togeth­er in a man­ner almost equiv­a­lent to that offered with­in a phys­i­cal room.”

Den­nis Vergne, who runs the pub­lic sec­tor man­age­ment con­sul­tan­cy Basis, and worked with Haringey on Agile, has seen this sort of inno­va­tion more wide­ly and expects it to last, not least as a way to cut costs.

“A num­ber of local author­i­ties went through some­thing like this before the pan­dem­ic, but we’ll see more. Putting apps and data into the cloud allows more of your staff to work from home or hot desk and this allows you to get rid of prop­er­ty or leased build­ings that are cost­ing the earth,” he says.

“You’ve also seen coun­cils replac­ing old lega­cy sys­tems with more flex­i­ble, cheap­er and secure soft­ware in the cloud mod­els.”

Changing culture is the first step to innovation

The prob­lem many organ­i­sa­tions face is that they invest­ed heav­i­ly in on-premise sys­tems years ago and are still locked into expen­sive con­tracts with the sup­pli­ers that built them. The prospect of under­train­ing com­plex IT migra­tion also scares many.

How­ev­er, IT man­aged ser­vice com­pa­nies such as Fortrus say they are break­ing this mould by tran­si­tion­ing pub­lic sec­tor organ­i­sa­tions from lega­cy sin­gle-ven­dor sys­tems onto more flex­i­ble wrap-around solu­tions. In such cas­es, clients pick from a wide range of dif­fer­ent soft­ware ven­dors, safe in the knowl­edge they will inte­grate seam­less­ly in the cloud.

The pan­dem­ic has left many pub­lic sec­tor tech­nol­o­gy depart­ments with shaky finances and an impe­tus to try new ways of work­ing. Gup­ta believes it could be the cat­a­lyst many need to final­ly make a con­cert­ed jump to the cloud.

“In the pub­lic sec­tor, chang­ing the cul­ture is usu­al­ly much hard­er than chang­ing the tech­nol­o­gy. But the pan­dem­ic is chang­ing cul­ture very fast. Peo­ple who were scared to make that jump are now seri­ous­ly think­ing about it and allo­cat­ing bud­get,” he con­cludes.