NHS (London) Commissioning Support Service
Engaged by the NHS
(specifically the Commissioning Support Service on behalf of London’s
Primary Care Trusts) to provide a variety of lead consulting services in the
greenfield development of a business intelligence solution. The CSS manages
a £10,000,000,000 budget.
Brought in as the single strategic
architectural lead for the entire project.
The engagement role of
enterprise architect had sole responsibility for all
technology and systems design.
After reviewing prior work and the current status with
other members of the senior management team, decided to reject the
Oracle-based strategy that had been in place, in favour of an end-to-end
Microsoft platform.
Commissioning of existing equipment was suspended until a detailed technical
architecture could be designed.
At this point, several workstreams proceeded in parallel.
One workstream was the technical architecture and product
selection. This included
processors, networking, storage, software infrastructure, and development
toolkit. A detailed sizing
exercise included projected network traffic.
Scaling options were considered, and a mutli-tier scale-out
architecture designed. Business
continuity, back-up needs, and a multi-site strategy were defined.
All this was pulled together into a single comprehensive
infrastructure document.
Negotiated with the winning vendor.
A
second workstream was project management and development strategy.
It was decided to pursue an aggressive delivery schedule, and a
dual-track approach was decided upon.
The first track was to identify an appropriate software package that
could provide at least some minimum functionality.
Analysis of business requirements, generation of a tender, and vendor
selection. The second track was
to initiate a formal data warehouse/business intelligence strategy.
This was based on blending tools, techniques and the Kimball method,
within the overall iterative, release-based methodology, Evolutionary
Development Methodology™.
A third parallel workstream was hiring staff and building
the team.
Establishing cultural norms and organisational style were critical to
eventual project success, as was working extremely closely with HR and the
Head of Corporate.
Organisational structure and writing numerous job descriptions also fell
within responsibility.
At about eight weeks into the engagement, the programme
manager left. The role of
programme manager was therefore added.
Staff supervised now included the business analysts as well as
software engineering. Microsoft
Team Suite/Team System 2008 has been introduced to the organisation.
Personally established Team System in the organisation, with a major
presentation supplied by Microsoft.
One main theme of the development has been presentation
of all information to business users through SharePoint Server 2007, whether
coming from Reporting Services, ProClarity Analytics, or PerformancePoint
Server 2007. In this way, a
single integrated portal is the secure way into the Service from the
viewpoint of all users.
Hired an external consultancy with SharePoint and web development expertise.
Another central theme has been the insistence on a formal
dimensional model using a bus matrix to support a federated data warehouse.
As part of this insistence, numerous ad-hoc mini-lectures, one-to-one
and group workshops, and a variety of other staff training activities have
been carried out.
The primary project focus has been to deliver
aggressively, while remaining within all of the constraints described..
To that end, the Chief Operating Officer established a target date of
the end of January to deliver a Pilot to one Primary Care Trust.
On 1st February 2008, we went live on the Pilot.
A week later, a senior member of the user organisation was happy to
report that fact to our Management Board.
Following that major success, was promoted yet again,
to work on the long-term strategy for the organisation.
Job title was now Technology Strategist.
Wrote the Release Strategy and Release Plan for the next year’s Releases.
Developed a proof-of-concept for Contract Management and
Monitoring using PerformancePoint Server 2007 (PPS)
and ProClarity Analytics.
Personally developed the critical Integrations Services data
transformations, the Analysis Services hypercubes, and the reporting
function with Reporting Services and ProClarity.
Personally created the PerformancePoint site and models, and loaded
the PPS database.
Personally established the Excel add-in for business users.
Personally brought the PerformancePoint system up to
ready-for-production status with direct input from the business community.
Defined integration of the new kit with the old, and thus
preserving original investment.
Managed infrastructure vendor liaison.
An underlying theme through the engagement has been
information governance and in particular, data security.
Wrote the Information Security Handbook, including detailed policies
for all aspects of the operation.
Made encryption of data a corporate requirement, and ensured that
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Kerberos Windows Integrated Security were all
in place and properly applied.
Introduced PGP as a standard and required that
it be used for all off-site data transport.
Developed relationship with external consultancy for security reviews
and pentration testing.
Functioned as Technical Authority for the programme.
Was Enterprise Administrator of CSS, was granted complete authority to view in clear all patient identifiable data for the entire population of London from Secondary Uses Services with an NHS SmartCard , and was the Primary Caldicott Guardian Delegated Authority with full authority over all subordinate delegated authorities for the National Strategic Data Service (Patient Demographic Services).
Carnival UK
On a crash project, provided data warehousing and business
intelligence consulting to Carnival UK Group (P & O Cruises,
The timebox for the project was extremely tight. Only ten weeks were budgeted for the development of the original scope: proof-of-concept.
This development was done in conjunction with much mentoring and
training of Carnival
The project began with scope and requirements, progressed through data and dimensional modelling, building the extract, transport, transformation and load (ETTL) system, loading both a single ship’s worth and then the entire fleet’s worth of data into the system, and concluded with creating a BO Universe and several sample reports.
The proof-of-concept was delivered within the timebox, and was considered highly successful. An additional four weeks were allocated to bring the system up to the level of a completely functional pre-production pilot system.
This extension to the project was based on assisting the move of the system into production. Much work was done on incremental loading and slowly changing dimensions. Oracle Work Flows were built, and used as part of system management. Responsibilities ranged from the strategic level, through design and build, down to software installations and deep ‘hands-on’ development of critical aspects of the system. Technical issues included match/merge functionality for householding, and use of Oracle Table Functions for extremely complex data transformations.
Demonstrations/presentations to senior client staff was part of the work.