Six lessons from a year in the cloud

1 Do the basics and then improve

At the out­set of the pan­dem­ic, Glouces­ter­shire Hos­pi­tals NHS Foun­da­tion Trust decid­ed to accel­er­ate its ten­ta­tive use of cloud com­put­ing. First, a secure, encrypt­ed vir­tu­al desk­top was launched to sup­port more than 1,000 staff work­ing from home and sat­is­fy strict gov­er­nance. Shift­ing clin­i­cal appli­ca­tions like e‑observations called for a longer con­ver­sa­tion.

“We pushed ahead and har­vest­ed mas­sive ben­e­fits,” says Stephen Hardy, asso­ciate chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer at the trust. Clin­i­cians work­ing from home and con­sul­tants in situ could view obser­va­tions of patients at any hos­pi­tal to iden­ti­fy dete­ri­o­rat­ing patients and remote­ly esca­late treat­ment. The con­tact­less, and safe, aspect of e‑observations was added col­lat­er­al.

Look­ing back over a gru­elling year, the biggest les­son is to exploit the cloud’s scal­a­bil­i­ty, to take small steps and to iter­ate, says Hardy. “With a ‘big bang’ imple­men­ta­tion, the plan­ning takes ages. With the cloud, it’s eas­i­er to focus on one area and then iter­ate. You do the basics and then finesse over the year.” Les­son two, says Hardy, is not to rein­vent every wheel just because you have the cloud. Tele­phone con­sul­ta­tions are prac­ti­cal and ade­quate in many sce­nar­ios.

The trust has start­ed a Sil­ver Lin­ings pro­gramme, which iden­ti­fies inno­va­tions that will be kept and enhanced post-COVID-19. “We’ll have a lot more of the work­force work­ing remote­ly; the flex­i­bil­i­ty means bet­ter staff reten­tion. E‑methods for clin­i­cal ser­vices are here to stay. We’re mov­ing towards a sin­gle por­tal that a clin­i­cian can log on to and see every­thing we know about a patient,” says Hardy. 

2 Make support flexible

Inde­pen­dent UK law firm Burges Salmon found the biggest les­son learnt when the firm accel­er­at­ed a nascent cloud migra­tion was to make sup­port a pri­or­i­ty. “Giv­en what peo­ple have been through and dealt with in the past 12 months, one stress we can take away is the anx­i­ety of tech­nol­o­gy not work­ing. We can give our peo­ple the com­fort of hav­ing the tools to do their job,” says Eddie Twem­low, Burges Salmon head of IT and oper­a­tions.

Twem­low increased the size of the ser­vice desk team to ensure staff always had access to sup­port when work­ing from home. “Pre-COVID, there were always col­leagues around to offer sup­port. Once at home, this was removed in an instant and staff often worked irreg­u­lar hours, too, fit­ting work around home school­ing,” he says.

To ramp up sup­port fast, staff were relo­cat­ed into the sup­port team. Recep­tion­ists who weren’t need­ed to meet and greet, and per­son­al assis­tants made the adap­ta­tion. The organ­i­sa­tion, as well as the tech­nol­o­gy, had to be flex­i­ble. Twem­low says: “It showed we were com­mit­ted to look­ing after our staff; some of those peo­ple have per­ma­nent­ly moved to the Tech­nol­o­gy team.”

The com­pa­ny has a strong col­le­giate cul­ture and func­tions such as the AGM and socials were also con­tin­ued vir­tu­al­ly by using col­lab­o­ra­tive tools pro­vi­sioned by the cloud. Work capa­bil­i­ties, such as vir­tu­al hear­ings and video con­fer­enc­ing for tri­al pre­sen­ta­tion, were rolled out faster too. “Large­ly, though, the cloud pro­gramme held true,” says Twem­low. 

3 Design digital touchpoints into the day

For a com­pa­ny adept at soft­ware and accus­tomed to run­ning its GPS track­ing busi­ness from the AWS cloud, the pan­dem­ic les­son learnt by RAM Track­ing was how to accli­ma­tise cul­tur­al­ly. With all staff work­ing remote­ly and dis­parate­ly, “we realised more had to be done around cre­at­ing reg­u­lar con­tact, sched­ul­ing meet­ings with man­age­ment and retain­ing water­cool­er con­ver­sa­tions,” says Scott Chesworth, RAM Track­ing oper­a­tions direc­tor. 

How­ev­er seam­less and per­for­mant the cloud and sophis­ti­cat­ed its dash­boards, peo­ple can’t work in iso­la­tion. “Our staff need­ed reg­u­lar touch­points on a dai­ly basis to keep morale strong. We have to retain the human touch in inter­ac­tions. You can achieve a lot through video con­fer­enc­ing, but a cou­ple of touch­points need to be designed into the work­ing day to have a chin­wag,” he says.

4 Take a business-led approach 

For Cal­i­co, a not-for-prof­it organ­i­sa­tion in the north-west of Eng­land that pro­vides hous­ing, wom­en’s refuges, and drug and alco­hol treat­ment ser­vices, the pan­dem­ic pro­vid­ed a mas­sive push to the cloud. “We’d already engaged with BCN Group about deliv­er­ing a [cloud-based] Microsoft 365 suite in the future. Then COVID hap­pened and we had to up our game,” says Anne-Marie Thorn­ley, head of ICT at Cal­i­co.

IT had pre­vi­ous­ly tak­en a back­seat at an organ­i­sa­tion ded­i­cat­ed to deliv­er­ing front-line ser­vices. “Sud­den­ly we had to change the mind­set of indi­vid­u­als and man­age­ment to pro­vide access to robust and secure col­lab­o­ra­tion tools,” says Thorn­ley. The les­son is to be more busi­ness led. Pre­vi­ous­ly projects had been IT led. This time the project was led by the exec­u­tive and wasn’t some­thing IT was “doing” to the organ­i­sa­tion. 

The bonus of this approach is many staff embraced new ways of work­ing, espe­cial­ly those who’d been less con­fi­dent. “They have a lot more tools in their box to con­nect and col­lab­o­rate with cus­tomers in new ways,” says Thorn­ley. 

5 Deliver products that meet customers’ needs

Recog­nise Bank launched in Novem­ber in the mid­dle of the pan­dem­ic, a bold move dri­ven by the “chron­ic under-serv­ing of the small and medi­um-sized enter­prise (SME) com­mu­ni­ty”. So says Jason Oak­ley, founder and chief exec­u­tive of Recog­nise and for­mer head of com­mer­cial bank­ing at Metro Bank. His propo­si­tion is rela­tion­ship-led bank­ing that’s dig­i­tal­ly enabled. Mak­ing the launch pos­si­ble dur­ing the pan­dem­ic restric­tions was nCi­no cloud tech­nol­o­gy.

Recog­nise Bank was licensed in Novem­ber, but has already learnt lessons when it comes to deliv­er­ing on its propo­si­tion of trust­ed advis­er. “A pan­dem­ic changes the way you onboard clients; we’ve devel­oped vir­tu­al onboard­ing over Teams or Zoom,” says Oak­ley. Recog­nise has also changed the way it instructs val­uers and lawyers to fast track loans and stream­line esig­na­tures. “It’s about con­ve­nience and touch­less, remote trad­ing, and the cloud caters to that,” he says. “It moti­vates me to har­ness cloud tech­nol­o­gy to improve user expe­ri­ence for the SME.”

Cloud tech­nol­o­gy speeds up prod­ucts that cater to cus­tomers’ chang­ing needs. And, with the vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme going well, busi­ness­es need a route out of the pan­dem­ic and that means access to work­ing cap­i­tal. “They have to reju­ve­nate and get going,” says Oak­ley. 

6 Pitch user experience, not performance

Pri­or to the pan­dem­ic, it had been a strug­gle to trans­form the Uni­ver­si­ty of Read­ing from an on-premis­es IT oper­a­tion to a cloud-enabled organ­i­sa­tion. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, there was a bar­ri­er in pro­cure­ment embrac­ing the cap­i­tal-expen­di­ture ver­sus oper­at­ing-expen­di­ture mod­el and the big dis­counts on soft­ware licences avail­able to high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions were hold­ing the uni­ver­si­ty hostage. For IT, the chal­lenge was to estab­lish the nec­es­sary gov­er­nance that would make cloud solu­tions eco­nom­i­cal­ly viable.

COVID cut through a three-year hia­tus. Frame, a vir­tu­al desk­top from Nutanix, was deployed to every employ­ee, deliv­er­ing a secure bun­dle of col­lab­o­ra­tion and office tools acces­si­ble from their home device. Kevin Mor­timer, head of oper­a­tions at the uni­ver­si­ty, says the big les­son learnt has been to pitch IT dif­fer­ent­ly. “Pre­vi­ous­ly we’d focused on per­for­mance and effi­cien­cy instead of the user expe­ri­ence peo­ple are con­sum­ing,” he says. 

“COVID’s been an oppor­tu­ni­ty to change how the organ­i­sa­tion works. Frame makes peo­ples’ lives eas­i­er and the cloud has reset our uni­ver­si­ty land­scape.”