Consilium Technologies opens new corporate headquarters in Belfast following recent US expansion.

One of Northern Ireland’s leading tech companies, Consilium Technologies, has announced the opening of its new corporate headquarters in Belfast. The company recently launched a major expansion at their North American facility in Boston and this move will allow the firm to scale its UK operations alongside its US facility. The move coincides with the company’s leading product TotalMobile™ announced as a medallist for the UK Mobile IT Innovation Award.

Previously based in the Antrim Technology Park, the firm has moved all business functions to Pilot Point in the heart of Clarendon Dock, Belfast.

Founded in 1985, the company was originally located in East Belfast. Two years later the team moved to the Antrim Technology Park where it has remained until now. In 2007, the software development team moved to the Northern Ireland Science Park to focus on the further development of TotalMobile™. The move to Pilot Point will see for the consolidation of all business and development operations in one location.

Speaking following the announcement of the new premises, Consilium Technologies CEO Colin Reid said: “Earlier this year we were delighted to announce an expansion to our North American operations. I said then that our US expansion would also have a positive effect here at home in Northern Ireland and the announcement is the first evidence of this.

“The decision to leave Antrim was not an easy one but the Consilium Group has now grown to such a size that we had to look elsewhere for facilities with the capabilities to accommodate all of our staff, under one roof.

“The new office will allow us to merge all operations into a single location. The Pilot Point facility will house our software development team, sales and marketing, business development and customer services. We have great plans for further expansion and we need our team all working together in one place to achieve this.”

Reid concluded: “We will be sad to bid farewell to Antrim. It’s been home to the Consilium Group for 24 years, but Pilot Point is a terrific location, right at the heart of Belfast’s thriving business community. “We have no doubt the move signals the start of even bigger things for us as a company and with TotalMobile™ commended for this award, it has already begun.”

Shortly after the move, Consilium’s latest innovation, TotalMobile™ secured a medal for the 2011 Mobile IT Innovation of the Year at the UK IT Awards. The award recognises organisations that provide leading-edge mobile technologies that create new ways of working and have shown measurable success and customer satisfaction.

TotalMobile™ is an enterprise mobile working solution that allows field workers to complete tasks and share information both online and offline integrating with existing back office systems and databases.

It helps organisations to:

• increase efficiency;

• encourage mutual working ; and

• increase compliance.

It can

• streamline the way mobile workers work

• improve the flow of information

• reduce costs

TotalMobile™’s entry was selected from 1,000’s of applications, to attend the next stage of the process, a judging panel at the Madejski Stadium in Reading. Chief Technology Officer Gareth Tolerton represented the company and demonstrated TotalMobile™’s Inovation and effectiveness. This resulted in TotalMobile™ joining a shortlist of innovations from 10 companies including Tesco, RBS, National Air Traffic Service and Pizza Express and finally being announced as a medallist at the ceremony held by the Chartered Institute for IT (BCS) at Battersea Park Events Arena. TotalMobile™ representatives including CEO Colin Reid attended to accept the medal.

Web: www.ctechs.co.uk
Telephone: 028 9033 0111
Email: info@ctechs.co.uk

There is little point in ‘doing’ social media if it does not meet your business objectives, according to Robin Hamman. Too many organisations are ending up with a presence that’s not interesting and does not help its audience.

“It is about the user,” he states. “It needs to be meaningful and it needs to result in measurable outcomes.”

Robin Hamman is Director of Digital at the UK office of global PR firm Edelman. Born in Illinois, he has lived in the UK since the 1990s. Hamman was previously the BBC’s Senior Community Producer, teaching BBC staff how to engage new audiences online.

The aim of his work in broadcasting was to bring audiences closer to programme- makers and editors by “letting them ask questions, point to facts or people that they think might be interesting within the story, and providing feedback once that story has gone out.”

He realised that this approach could be applied elsewhere: “People with skills like this, skills to seek out and engage directly with audiences and stakeholders, are becoming increasingly important within businesses.”

Hamman adds: “It’s not just about describing products and services that already exist, and then trying to flog those. It’s increasingly about understanding what audiences and stakeholders want and getting the business to actually point itself in the direction to fulfil those needs.”

Edelman sees the world of digital as three “different but interconnected” spheres: own, social and search.

The first sphere includes the corporate website which puts forward the organisation’s views “but in most instances it does very little to attract people who don’t know about you already or to meet their needs.”

In social media, people participate “across the web wherever they choose to”.

The ‘social media embassy’ is a concept that sits between those two spheres. This is a brand- or organisationally-controlled presence in social media. It’s not owned by the brand but, like a real world embassy, offers a door for constituents or stakeholders to “knock on”.

Hamman continues: “People are increasingly spending time in social media and, rather than trying to attract them and bring them across to their organisational website, it’s a lot easier to be out there participating, where they might stumble into you and then engage.”

Links from other websites or in online discussions will raise a company’s search visibility on Google.

To look at it in another way, brands and companies exist in a “multi-stakeholder ecosystem”. Those stakeholders include the media, investors, regulators, unions, employees, customers and potential recruits.

However, organisations tend to silo their activities into different departments (marketing, sales, recruitment etc.) with each one having its own budget, digital systems and internal processes. He describes that space between the silos as the “gulf of organisational complexity” and social media can help to cut through it.

“With the tools available, it is possible to understand what your audiences and stakeholders want from you, to respond to them, to engage them in coming up with new products and services, or indeed to get them to assist you when a problem does arise,” Hamman remarks.

On the last point, social media allows companies to create spaces where customers can help other customers to overcome their problems with a service or product.

When approaching social media, businesses must recognise that all staff are representatives of the brand. The average person on the street does not see the person to whom they have spoken as a ‘someone in recruitment or marketing’ but instead sees “all one business.”

Businesses can “harness” how employees talk about their jobs online (e.g. via facebook): “Most of the time it’s positive, sometimes it’s neutral and occasionally it’s negative.”

First and foremost, this means having social media guidelines. As an extension, a brand can encourage its staff to communicate with their own networks on its behalf.

PepsiCo, for example, employs around 150,000 employees globally. He suggests that getting even a small percentage of those employees to “communicate on behalf of the brand in a way that’s contextually relevant” to their friends would have a “multiplication effect”. The employee would share that message with audiences that have similar interests to him or her.

From an historical perspective, social media brings back one-to-one contact between businesses and their stakeholders or consumers.

“Over the last 50-100 years [there] has been a time of mass production, mass communication and mass consumption,” he reflects. “You still get the benefits of doing things at a mass scale but you can engage directly one-to-one with those audiences and consumers. It’s quite interesting what that allows businesses to do.”

Customers and stakeholders are potentially “much happier” and engagement “helps them feel part of what the business or organization is trying to achieve.”

Edelman promotes “digital public engagement” and “meaningful participatory frameworks” that align the behavious of stakeholders with measurable business outcomes. Relevant questions include: “Who is my audience? What do they want to achieve? How can I help them to achieve it? And then how does that meet my business objectives?”

The BBC, for example, learnt lessons from its initial audience forums. Viewers and listeners were asked to simply ‘have their say’ on programmes. This resulted in “a flood of content that was oftentimes inappropriate or low quality or not relevant”.

Better results came when the audience was asked a specific question e.g. whether they knew someone who had experienced a particular medical condition and might like to be interviewed about it. Two or three people came forward; the contact was useful for them and the broadcaster.

“When you look at social media more broadly,” he surmises. “It can look like anarchy and where it’s interesting is where it’s doing something meaningful.”

Mobiles and silos: a case study

Robin recounted the experience of a mobile phone network that has become somewhat of an industry case study of how connecting up external and internal facing processes can cut the time required to deal with customer service incident. The network is said to have launched a new mobile phone handset where the battery was meant to last four or five days. Customers soon realised that it went dead in three to four hours.

The launch took place on a Friday and the customer care team cancelled leave over the weekend to take complaints. However, no-one told the marketing and advertising teams. Front page ads went ahead in the Saturday papers. The problem only got worse.

On Monday morning, a member of the technical team happened to be at a meeting with the marketing and communications reps. He soon figured out the problem: default software settings meant that antennae were always looking for connections, causing battery to burn out. A video was shot, put on YouTube and was used to show customers how to change the settings.

A summary of BT’s work

BT has developed an impressive track record of providing transformation for local and devolved government bodies, including those in Northern Ireland. Our expertise in this arena has evolved to complement BT’s long-standing core competency in ICT. It now embraces innovative commercial models, a complete range of people and change management skills, and the ability to deliver economic benefits such as job creation and regeneration at a regional level.

Here is a look at our track record: different challenges, bespoke solutions, and the consistent delivery of significant benefits.

Case Studies

In 2000, BT was chosen as strategic partner by Land and Property Services for Northern Ireland (LPS), formerly known as Land Registers of Northern Ireland (LRNI). The agency is responsible for recording details of legal interest pertaining to land in Northern Ireland. LRNI was faced with legislative change, reliance on paper records and manual processes and a requirement to enhance customer service.

BT provided the capital for the transformation programme, and an incentive structure was created to drive growth of the LRNI business. BT delivered a range of systems integration and implementation services, as well as change management and business consultancy and a full upgrade of the

LRNI ICT estate. The outcomes have included major productivity gains, customer satisfaction and external recognition for the project.

At about the same time, BT was embarking on a strategic joint venture with Liverpool City Council, creating Liverpool Direct Ltd., with a £58 million investment from BT to enable a wide range of service improvement initiatives. As with LRNI, ICT transformation was fundamental, along with creation of call centre capability to drive customer service and process re-engineering. BT also effected significant culture change for the council, creating HR and payroll systems that foster a proactive, engaged ethos.

In the first five years of the partnership, the council’s cost base was reduced by over £100 million, and Liverpool went from being a poor performing council to one showing upper-quartile performance across all its KPIs when measured against industry standard. Employees and users of the council have benefited immensely.

In 2008 BT embarked on a radical and ambitious partnership with South Tyneside Council, with objectives far beyond business transformation alone. Given the economic decline of the 1970s and 1980s in the region, the council has decided to prioritise socio-economic regeneration alongside the improvement of already high-performing authority services.

BT has created a wholly owned subsidiary, BT South Tyneside Ltd., which has committed to investing £23 million in service transformation. BT is also committed to creating 750 jobs over the 10 years of the partnership, generating over £200 million in gross value-add. Targeted reductions in procurement costs, streamlined processes (for example, for housing benefit claims) and enhanced benefits and career opportunities for council staff who transferred to BT South Tyneside Ltd via TUPE, are also part of the commitment.

The early indications point to success on Tyneside. 375 jobs were created in the first two years, ahead of the target of 300, with another 280 announced just last month. 84 per cent of service performance indicators have improved, and customer and employee satisfaction ratings are both above 90 per cent. BT’s approach is delivering on the ambitious commitments made to the people of South Tyneside.

Looking to the future, BT has just signed a strategic, 10-year partnership with Lancashire County Council which has resulted in the creation of a jointly owned subsidiary, One Connect Ltd., to provide ICT and back office services for the county council and schools in the region. Among other benefits, this will deliver £100 million in savings to the council over the lifetime of the deal, by delivering new technology more quickly, and providing core services such as HR and payroll more effectively.

The challenge for Northern Ireland

HM Treasury’s consultation document of March 2011, “Rebalancing the Northern Ireland Economy”, summarised the UK Government’s view:

“The Northern Ireland economy faces major challenges over the next decade [the] economy has some historical strengths which it can build on, underpinned by the peace process. However, it also has some long standing weaknesses such as the low productivity and low employment rates.”

This is a challenging message to leaders and stakeholders in the economy here, but the opportunities to drive productivity and employment cannot be ignored. Technology can be the cornerstone of improving existing services and delivering new ones, but BT has now developed the innovative commercial and partnership models that allow the management of risk, the transformation of capability and the delivery of wide-ranging economic benefits.

Ed Vernon is Strategic Advisor to BT Ireland, and his comment on how to respond to the challenges of the last few years is resonant: “Business leaders have become more risk-averse and need to reinforce financial disciplines. They need to be flexible with costs by aligning to incentives and performance; move online to drive scale and efficiency; bring in others to look out for blind spots; and stay close to their people and customers.”

At BT, we believe our track record demonstrates what we can offer local and devolved government authorities in Northern Ireland, building on the strategic partnerships and shared services we are already delivering with the public sector here. Our local expertise is available to co-ordinate and leverage the experience of our global brand and capability.

Testimonials

Our partners discuss their experience working with BT

“We were impressed with BT’s track record and its technology made the proposal stand out. BT’s innovative approach to financing the project was extremely attractive to us and made the whole programme possible.”

Wally Gamble landweb Project Manager Land Registers of Northern Ireland

“We’re getting the benefit of BT’s expertise in communications technologies as well as support for the process of business transformation. I think that’s a pretty compelling offer. The joint venture partnership with BT has been a huge asset in the recovery of Liverpool and the transformation of the city council.”

Colin Hilton Chief Executive Liverpool City Council

“We were looking for a partner to help drive the long term strategic priorities of South Tyneside. With a proven track record, we chose BT to help improve economic prosperity, generate significantly more jobs and locate BT’s local government operations in the borough, kick-starting our major regeneration of the South Shields riverside.”

Martin Swales Chief Executive South Tyneside Council

“Almost two years in, the partnership has met or exceeded all service delivery targets. Despite the recession, job creation is now ahead of schedule, the business centre is under construction and savings are being delivered to the council as promised. Satisfaction amongst TUPE’d staff remains high. As an excellent council our standards were high and BT has shown that our outsourced services and staff are in safe hands and that they can be relied upon to deliver what they promise.”

Alan Holt Partnership Director South Tyneside Council

To find out more about BT’s new model for central and local government in Northern Ireland, please visit us online at:

www.btnorthernireland.com/business

Reducing duplication, making procurement easier for SMEs by only allowing ICT projects that cost less than £100,000, implementing cloud computing and making the internet central to engagement with citizens are at the core of the Coalition Government’s ICT Strategy.

Announcing the strategy in March, Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude said: “For too long, government has wasted vast amounts of money on ineffective and duplicate ICT systems.”

The strategy document notes: “The Cabinet Office will also work with the devolved administrations to develop a shared vision that aligns with the principles of the strategy.”

In four parts, the strategy aims to tackle problems such as:

• projects being too complex;

• wasteful duplication by departments, agencies and public bodies;

• systems not being interoperable; • over-capacity in data centres; and

• procurement timescales being too long and costly for all but multi- national suppliers.

Actions to be undertaken by the Government within six months, one year and two years are outlined in the strategy. A Cabinet Office spokeswoman said that a strategic implementation plan would be released at the end of September dealing with the implementation of these actions but would not confirm if the specific six- month actions have been implemented or were underway.

Part one aims to reduce waste and project failure and stimulate economic growth by sharing and reusing ICT services.

Within six months the Government had said it would:

• implement the first stage of a cross- government ICT register;

• introduce a new ICT procurement system;

• establish an open source implementation group and advisory panel; and

• publish guidance on the presumption against government ICT projects valued at over £100 million.

Part two outlines how the Government will push ahead with its plans to reduce the cost of using data centres by 35 per cent over the next five years thereby cutting its carbon footprint.

Within six months the Government had intended to publish a cloud computing strategy with detailed implementation plans. Over the year, it plans to develop a desktop prototype for the cloud and publish guidance on delivering interoperable and open ICT solutions.

Part three examines using ICT to enable change and outlines the Government’s vision for “agile, personalised and responsive services” that will replace the traditional face-to-face, telephone or paper channels of communication with citizens.

The Directgov website will be the single point of contact for services such as job seeker’s allowance. For those without internet access, the post offices and UK online centres (which were established by the Labour Government in 1999, operating in community centres, schools and churches, providing free internet access) will operate as “assisted digital service providers.”

In addition, social media and e-petitions will allow citizens to have more dialogue and involvement with government and Parliament (see agendaNi, issue 48, page 127.)

Part four focuses on strengthening governance. This is under way with the establishment of a new ministerial committee: the Public Expenditure Committee (Efficiency and Reform). Chief information officers (CIOs) from the largest delivering departments will sit on a CIO Delivery Board and will be in charge of implementing the ICT Strategy.

The strategy points out that “many of these actions represent not just technological change, but changes to the operating culture of government [therefore] strong leadership within and across all departments will be required to drive this strategy forward.”

The Republic’s Programme for Government committed to making Ireland a “first-mover” in information technology by making more progress on e- government, moving government services online, and investing in ICT in schools and the healthcare sector.

Currently, citizens can engage with government through the gov.ie website which includes links to the 16 departments, plus eight e-government websites (see box).

At the end of June, Public Expenditure and Reform Minister Brendan Howlin launched an online portal making 300 services available online. These include: social welfare applications, court fine payment, proof of age applications, live Oireachtas debates, birth certificate purchases and access to the 1901 and 1911 censuses.

As part of the new ethos of transparency within government and the comprehensive review of public expenditure, Howlin also launched a databank providing information on every aspect of government expenditure since 1994. Users can create tables, spreadsheets and graphs showing how spending on current, capital, or pay has evolved across government and in individual departments.

The Government will organise existing state supports for cloud computing into a package to promote Ireland as a progressive place for IT investment. However, work must be undertaken to ensure that public sector information stored in the cloud is secure. The Government will not move its information to the public cloud until it irons out concerns over security, reliability, vendor lock-in and saving data outside the jurisdiction. Since 2002, the Irish Government has used ‘government networks’, a countrywide private telecommunications resource used by all public bodies.

A cross-departmental taskforce on cloud computing was established by Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Minister Richard Bruton at the end of June to tackle the above security problems and to review legislation to see what steps need to be taken to ensure a supportive regulatory environment.

Bruton said that while cloud computing held great economic potential for Ireland “it is also crucial that government, as a major user of IT in the economy, take a lead in this area in order to provide opportunities and economies of scale for growing businesses in this sector.”

The taskforce is chaired by Seán Gorman (Secretary General of the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation) and includes representatives from the department and its main agencies (IDA, Enterprise Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland, Forfás), the Data Protection Commissioner’s Office, the Department of Justice and Equality, the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. Other representatives including industry will attend taskforce meetings as appropriate.

Bruton has said that cloud computing is at the forefront of the Government’s thinking. The department is engaged in research and conducting trials with a number of major international ICT companies “to determine what works best for public bodies and to develop compelling commercial models for adoption.”

In education, the Government will integrate ICT into teaching and learning across the curriculum. Investment in broadband development will ensure schools have access to fibre-powered broadband and will be paid for by pooling ICT procurement.

More subjects will be taught online and schools will be able to ‘share’ teachers via live web chats.

However, Education Minister Ruairi Quinn has said that due to financial constraints he “is not currently in a position to commit additional resources to ICT capital investment.” However, he remains committed to investing in this area “as resources permit.”

The Programme for Government does not outline any specific ICT strategy for the healthcare sector.

e-government sites
www.citizensinformation.ie
www.e-tenders.gov.ie
www.irishstatutebook.ie
www.irisoifigiuil.ie
www.merrionstreet.ie
www.pensionsboard.ie
www.publicjobs.ie
www.revenue.ie

Leading public services provider Amey is helping to create ‘Libraries of the Future’ across 99 sites in Belfast, where state-of- the-art technologies will improve the customer experience and generate efficiencies around the clock.

As public libraries face unprecedented financial pressures, Amey and Libraries NI are implementing a single computerised library service. New technologies will allow customers to check multiple items in at once, pay charges and return items without assistance from library staff. This means staff are freed up to provide additional support to customers.

Amey also expects to save 520,000kg of carbon emissions in one year, through introducing power-saving software in around 2,000 computers.

It forms part of the Electronic Libraries for Northern Ireland project, which is aimed at improving customer satisfaction through creating a single, computerised library service with a common catalogue and stock, providing free internet access in every library and expanding public access and learning opportunities.

Amey, which employs 250 people in Northern Ireland, has been responsible for managing the entire library information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure across 99 sites for the past 10 years through a contract with Libraries NI.

This approach means Amey can use the most innovative solutions to make efficiencies and manage thousands of assets in the Libraries NI estate.

In 2002 the contract was recognised by the Office of Government Commerce as an exemplar ICT PFI. It was the first contract of its kind in the UK to share between library authorities, a single network infrastructure across all areas of business.

The Library of the Future

Under this scheme, Amey provides a number of ICT services, including IT infrastructure and network managed services, desktop and network management, software technical support, network security and disaster recovery, public user authentication, 3G and satellite technology and RFID which allows library customers to check multiple items in at once without assistance from library staff.

Delia Campbell, account manager at Amey said: “Libraries are not just about books; they’re multimedia centres. We believe in continuing that modern approach throughout the service to generate the best experience for customers as well as create efficiencies, at a time when budgets are being tightly squeezed.”

Radio Frequency Identification

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology allows a device to read information contained in a wireless device, and provides a method to transmit and receive data from one point to another.

Amey, in partnership with Intellident (the leading provider of RFID solutions for libraries in Europe) successfully proposed the installation of the innovative RFID solution into two libraries as part of a pilot: Bangor Carnegie Library and Antrim Library. Amey manages the solution after installation.

The benefits from implementing this technology include significant savings on operating costs by maintaining current staffing requirements despite the increase in library size. Staff can now interact with customers more and provide activities and programmes, making better use of the libraries resources, as traditional library duties are controlled and monitored by RFID technology.

RFID technology allows library customers to check multiple items in at once and pay their library charges as well as return items without assistance from library staff. This provides staff with extra resources to offer additional learning services to customers.

Power Management

In April 2011 Amey implemented an innovative and sustainable power management solution across the entire Libraries NI estate to allow for a more energy efficient ICT network.

Amey has installed Verismic software in around 2,000 computers enables them to enter a low-power sleep mode when the library is closed. Amey regularly monitors these machines and report savings to Libraries NI. Current predictions for the 12 months since installation suggest carbon savings of over 520,000kg and a 56 per cent reduction in inactivity time.

Virtual Data Centre

Virtual Data Centre (VDC) on-demand delivers the benefits of cloud computing. It lets organisations create, use, monitor and manage their VDC service through a secure portal.

Deployed out of a BT data centre, the system gives Amey 99.9 per cent service availability and a disaster recovery solution that can fully restore data in days rather than weeks. Amey is the first full deployment in Ireland of BT VDC.

From its Belfast office, Amey can create, deploy, monitor and manage the library disaster recovery (DR) service through a self-care portal. A crucial part of BT offering, it means services can be stopped or started in minutes. Virtual servers are deployed in less than an hour, giving Amey the agility to ‘flex’ the business up or down to meet the needs of the libraries.

“Electronic Libraries for Northern Ireland is one of our most exciting and innovative projects, dramatically changing the way libraries are run in Northern Ireland. The Amey team in Belfast has formed a key part of facilitating the delivery of library services across Northern Ireland.” Desi Curry, Head of Intelligent Customer Unit, Libraries NI.

For more information visit: www.amey.co.uk

The largest ever auction of mobile phone spectrum has been delayed, and is now likely to happen in the second quarter of 2012 at the earliest, paving the way for the advent of fourth generation mobile phone technology. The spectrum to be purchased by the mobile phone network operators will be needed to deliver demand for mobile broadband services on smartphones, which are becoming increasingly popular. Twenty-three per cent of Northern Ireland mobile phone users use a smartphone.

Auctioning of fourth generation (4G) licences was expected to happen early in 2012 but has been delayed reportedly because of threatened legal challenges by some of the larger mobile phone operators to Ofcom’s proposed auctioning terms.

Currently, there are four mobile phone operators in the UK: O2, Vodafone, Everything Everywhere (T-Mobile-Orange) and Three. Three, however, has less spectrum capacity to carry data traffic than the other companies. Furthermore, in January Ofcom gave the other companies permission to reallocate spare spectrum from phone calls to data activities. The auction will represent 25 per cent of the total spectrum (the airwaves that carry information between mobile handsets and the internet).

There has been a massive increase in the demand for mobile broadband data services such as video streaming, email, social networking and mapping services. The issue is also relevant to the Government’s commitment to providing universal access to broadband by 2015 (see page 56). With fibre and copper broadband unlikely to provide universal broadband access, 4G technology will become more important. Northern Ireland has 100 per cent broadband access and 75 per cent penetration (74 per cent in the UK).

Ofcom’s Communications Market Report for Northern Ireland, published in August, revealed that 92 per cent of people in the province use a mobile phone (the highest proportion in the UK), with 23 per cent of mobile users using smartphones (30 per cent in the UK). Thirty-seven per cent of 16-34 year olds in Northern Ireland have smartphones. Smartphone users in the UK are more likely to use the devices for phone calls every day (81 per cent) compared to regular users (53 per cent).

The report also showed that only 54 per cent of people in Northern Ireland live in a postcode area with good 3G coverage from at least one operator. This is the lowest rate in the UK.

Auction of the 4G licences will involve the sale of 80 per cent more spectrum than the third generation auction in 2000.

Ofcom research published in May showed that 4G mobile technology will deliver more than 200 per cent of the capacity of existing 3G technologies, using the same amount of spectrum. Users, for example, will be able to download a video in a third of the time it takes today on a 3G network. By 2020 it is expected to be five and a half times more efficient. It also found that 4G technologies on its own will not be sufficient to meet the expected growth in demand for mobile data.

In its consultation document on the auction published in March, Ofcom proposed establishing maximum and minimum limits to the amount of spectrum bidders can win by disregarding any auction outcomes in which four companies do not win the minimum amount of spectrum necessary to provide quality data services.

Ofcom also wanted to set a maximum limit to how much spectrum one company could gain, as well as an obligation in one licence for the 800 MHz spectrum to provide mobile broadband service covering 95 per cent of the UK population. It proposed to supplement this with a requirement to cover a certain proportion of the population in rural areas.

The regulator expects 4G services to be widely available across the UK a few years after roll-out in 2013.

Northern Ireland will receive £4.4 million of the UK Government’s £530 million Broadband Investment Fund but an MLA claims that much more action is needed to reach into rural areas.

The money will be used by the Executive to help extend high speed broadband. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) also expects the Executive to match the package, bringing funds up to £8.8 million.

One hundred per cent broadband access in Northern Ireland (at a minimum of 512 Kbps) was announced in January 2006, although some customers could only receive this by satellite rather than the conventional telephone line. Around 420,000 broadband connections have now been made; approximately 1,000 customers still use the satellite service.

At present, 97 per cent of the province’s homes and businesses can receive superfast broadband (i.e. 24 Mbps or more).

Northern Ireland’s allocation is 0.8 per cent of the total package. If the funding matched its population share (2.9 per cent), it would rise to £15.4 million. However, Westminster decided to share out the funding according to need i.e. the cost of taking of taking superfast broadband to premises that would not receive it from the market alone.

The Government is also considering holding a pilot in Northern Ireland to explore how to take superfast broadband to all homes and businesses. Pilots are already operating in the English and Scottish countryside and each one is worth £5-10 million. It is not yet clear when this announcement will be made.

Its UK-wide aims are:

• creating the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015;

• 90 per cent of homes and businesses in each local authority area having access to superfast broadband; and

• everyone having access to at least 2Mbps.

“Our investment will help provide everyone with decent broadband access and ensure no-one is left behind in the digital age,” said Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

However, Fermanagh and South Tyrone MLA Phil Flanagan is sceptical. The Sinn Féin representative told agendaNi that at least £30 million was needed to provide broadband over 2 Mbps for all residents. Wales, he pointed out, was “similarly sparsely populated” and received £56.9 million: “We are a very rural population here. We need to be looked at in that light.”

In response, a DCMS spokesman emphasised that Northern Ireland is already ahead of other regions and repeated that funding was allocated by need. “In some remote areas, it will cost more to reach households than in others,” he commented. “We have calculated the size of the problem in each area and how much it will cost to fix it. The allocations are based on that calculation.”

DETI already has a separate Northern Ireland Broadband Fund, which was worth £1.9 million when it was launched in August 2008. The fund supports trials run by telecoms companies and covers up to 35 per cent of a project’s costs. Its sixth round (for £500,000) closed for applications on 12 August and the resulting projects must be completed by 31 March 2012.

Separately in July, Ofcom reduced the prices that BT Wholesale can charge internet service providers in areas where there is currently little or no competition, including most parts of Northern Ireland. The reduction, for consumers, will be 11 per cent below inflation per year.

The charge controls came into effect in August and apply until 31 March 2014. ADSL 2+ technology is exempted, to encourage BT to invest in this technology.

An overview of the Regional Support Centre of Northern Ireland (RSCni) and its forthcoming work.

With the start of the 2011-2012 academic year, the RSCni is once again at the forefront in delivering support to the six area-based Further Education (FE) colleges and the Higher Education (HE) institutions within Northern Ireland.

With the world economic profile changing Northern Ireland has witnessed extensive economic changes, none more so than in education. Issues such as increased student fees, organisational restructuring, and new budget constraints have presented new challenges within the sector. The RSCni supports the colleges and universities as they strive to find new and innovative ways to deliver a world- class educational service. The challenge for the sector will be to deliver this service on a reduced budget whilst maintaining the current high standards of quality.

The RSCni Support Programme

Within the context of austerity the role of the RSCni is to assist organisations find new and cost effective ways to deliver their educational services and strategic objectives. The RSCni provides a range of innovative training programmes throughout the year supporting all levels of staff from within the organisation. For example, using technologies such as video conferencing, webinars and collaborative platforms for the delivery of training demonstrates best practice in the area of sustainability.

The RSCni has recently complemented its training facilities, upgrading to a new Smart Board and high spec video conferencing unit. For any queries regarding RSCni training or booking of their facilities please contact Support at: support@rsc-ni.ac.uk

The programme of events is influenced by the FE and HE sectors which form part of the RSCni Advisory Group. This year the key themes emerging are: Virtualisation, Mobile Technologies, E-portfolios and the development of open source Virtual Learning Environments. Training events will be incorporated using a variety of delivery mechanisms such as face to face workshops, webinars, video conferencing and the use of collaborative technologies.

Annual Conference

In keeping with the theme of sustainability, this year’s Annual Conference will be held online, a first for the RSCni. This will provide the opportunity to engage with sessions of particular interest, thus reducing your carbon footprint. Dates for your diary are the 5-6 April 2012. Further details will be available on our website closer to the time. The RSCni hopes that this method of delivery will provide the forum for greater engagement with the FE and HE sector.

Training and Work Based Learning Sector The RSCni is happy to announce a programme designed specifically to support the Training and Work Based Learning sector in Northern Ireland. A catalogue outlining training options and a new support site which includes a pricing structure will be launched at the end of October.

In order that the Training and Work Based Learning sector is able to exploit the benefits of ILT and meet its e-learning objectives, appropriate and stable technical infrastructure and systems are needed. The RSCni can support organisations’ ICT and ILT planners and engineers in the delivery of these objectives by providing support, advice, guidance and hands-on consultancy.

The Technology in Learning Delivery Qualification The RSCni are pleased to be involved in a new development with the Further Education sector. They have been charged by the Department for Employment and Learning to work together and develop a new Level 4 Blended Learning qualification. This qualification will be mandatory for all further education lecturers who wish to incorporate blended learning into their course delivery. The RSC has been asked to support this project and to assist colleges in their production of the online teaching content.

The RSCni would like to take this opportunity to welcome three new members of staff who will work with the core RSCni team and assist in the conversion of course teaching materials to multimedia online content. The new staff are: Chris Boyle, Instructional Designer and Samir Mohamedain and Daniel Keenan, Placement Students.

Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) The RSCni is part of, and benefits from, a UK-wide service of 12 RSCs and 6 other support services centrally led by JISC Advance. JISC inspires colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies helping to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in education. The JISC services aim to complement the support framework offered by the RSCni by providing advice and guidance on a wide range of issues. The services include: JISC Legal, JISC TechDis, JISC Netskills, JISC Digital Media, JISC ProcureWeb and JISC InfoNet.

Impact

The RSCni has remained the leading RSC within the UK in terms of customer satisfaction. It has had a very productive year with just over 500 support consultations and training provided for approximately 1,200 college and university staff. Some notable examples of their success were assisting colleges to successfully bid for JISC funded projects, the continual support to colleges in achieving embedded status of ILT and the initial engagement with the Excellence Gateway. Amongst the strengths of the RSCni is its ability to proactively offer solutions to colleges by remaining at the forefront of new and emerging technologies.

The Way Forward

The RSCni acknowledges the good practice within the field of e-learning that has taken place within Northern Ireland. In recognition of this, it would like to celebrate these achievements by hosting the first ever RSCni e-Learning Awards. Details on the award categories and how to nominate will be announced in the forthcoming issue of the RSCni Newsletter.

Welcome to a new member of staff to the RSCni The RSCni is delighted to welcome Donna Hyland from Belfast Metropolitan College as our new E-learning Advisor.

Donna has worked in the Further and Higher Education sectors for almost twenty years. Having a breadth of experience from lecturing to project development, her experience has given her an enthusiasm for technology enhanced learning which will be an asset within her role at the RSCni.

Team

Kate Guy, Manager Barbara Stewart, Administrator Audrey Graham, e-learning Advisers Donna Hyland, e-learning Advisers Noel McDaid, e-learning Advisers

Contact details 14 Lennoxvale, Belfast, BT9 5BY Tel: 028 9097 6511 Website: www.rsc-ni.ac.uk Moodle: http://vle.rsc-ni.ac.uk Twitter:@Rscni

Neil Jordan has had an “incredibly exciting” journey while developing Microsoft’s health ICT work, and has seen first hand its real potential to transform services once the the technology is comprehensively rolled out.

Jordan is Microsoft’s General Manager of Worldwide Health and is speaking to agendaNi from Seattle as a radical phase of health reform gathers pace in Northern Ireland. Jordan will be in the North in a few weeks’ time to talk directly on the subject to people in the sector. He firstly differentiates between technology in general and information technology.

“Healthcare has benefitted enormously from advances in technology, whether that’s vaccination technology 30 years ago, the use of non-invasive diagnosis technology, and more recently genetic and proteomic technology,” he comments.

“Given how information-centric the quest of delivering quality healthcare at acceptable or at least contained cost is, it’s interesting how information technology has not only lagged some of the other forms of technology in health but also lagged the use of information technology in other industries.”

His particular interest is in ICT: the convergence of information technology and voice technology is “essential” in health. The last 10 years have seen the increasing use of electronic medical records, and more communication and collaboration using new technology. That said, ICT is not yet in widespread, standardised use in health and is certainly not available for everyone. Providers with larger budgets are more likely to take it up.

Jordan notes that “there’s still a lot of art as well as a lot of science” in health as an industry. Sectors which allow for “real transformational change at scale” are sometimes hard to find. He sees a lot of pilots being embraced across the system but bringing that to scale is the hard part. Implementation has proved “very difficult” in the NHS in England.

Asked why this is the case in health, he points to three parts of the system: healthcare staff, the finance departments and the political decision-makers.

“If you don’t deliver value right in the moment of usage, specifically for clinical workers, they won’t use the systems,” he states firstly.

“The clinical users are already pretty efficient in the way that they work,” he remarks, “and unless information technology provides them with the benefit at the time that they’re going to use it, we’re not really going to get the systemic benefits that we can get from using information technology.”

In practice, that value may mean a community nurse inputting information at the point of care rather than going back to an office to key it in. Alternatively, a specialist doctor may need access to National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) resources on heterotypic bone growth.

Financially, ICT is often not seen as a strategic imperative compared to other parts of the health ‘ecosystem’. Jordan suggests: “How many hospitals have a Chief Medical Information Officer rather than just an IT Director who reports into the Head of Finance?”

Most health organisations, in his estimate, spend less than 3 per cent of their operating budget on ICT. This compares a general proportion of 4-5 per cent across government, a 6-7 per cent norm in the private sector, and 10-12 per cent for intensive e-commerce.

At a higher level, people are nervous about the returns they will get, especially in the current economic conditions. It is politically risky for a Minister to say: “I am going to close that ER and I’m going to use that money instead to put in a telehealth system which will allow me to scale to many, many more people.”

A fundamental discussion about the nature of health needs to take place: “Do we believe that we will solve some of the problems of quality and access to health just by maintaining the current system, or by making some real transformational changes which are highly reliant on a better transport of information and a use of information technology?”

Cusp of change

Looking forward, he senses that health is “on the cusp of bigger changes and opportunities”.

Firstly, staff will realise that putting in an electronic records system is not going to solve all problems. More communication and collaboration is needed, and there is already a substantial uptake in Microsoft Lync, an enterprise-class voice and videoconferencing and instant messaging system. A radiologist and physician, for example, can see and discuss the same image in an instant, rather than filling out forms to arrange a review meeting.

Cloud is the second area of change. Jordan appreciates that many smaller health organisations “simply don’t have the time, expertise or in some cases budget to invent some of these systems and cloud allows us to do that a lot more easily and cost effectively.”

He points to how Office 365 encourages collaboration in a network of Dutch orthopaedic centres, spread across small offices. In Rio de Janeiro, 160 public health clinics keep 500,000 records on Microsoft’s Azure system, with minimal infrastructure and investment.

The third opportunity is in maximum user interfaces. People, whether staff or patients at home, will not use systems unless they are “easy and intuitive to use”. Voice- or motion-based interactions are the most natural and the Kinect software already being used in hospitals will make use of these.

Across the board, health ICT needs to shift from a hospital-centric mainframe model to the personal and community- centric PC model. Achieving the benefits, though, takes longer than the typical electoral cycle.

European healthcare systems, Jordan notes, are more centralised and also proportionately less expensive than their equivalents across the Atlantic.

OECD figures show that the share of Dutch GDP spent on health stabilised at 9.7-10 per cent over 2003-2008 (although it rose to 12 per cent in 2009). The Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport has two main sub-divisions (public health and health care), recognising that prevention controls the costs of dealing with illness.

The USA is one of the very few countries where the payment system is geared entirely towards paying for procedures once people get sick rather than managing and preventing illness. The changes needed are starting to happen but are hard and, today are not moving fast enough for the economy or the citizens.

Customer relationship management (CRM) or, in this case patient relationship management, has a key role in reducing those costs. It links community care with hospital care, and can help to stop re- admissions.

Amalga, an enterprise health intelligence platform from Microsoft, can aggregate and amalgamate large amounts of data. “We can start to understand, using high performance computing, what the trends are for re-admissions,” he explains, “and decide much more early whether a patient is likely to be re-admitted in 30, 40 or 50 days and the processes to stop that from happening.”

This not only increases the patient’s quality of life but also reduces the cost burden. In England, patients at home can use HealthVault to monitor their own health and the systems can be tailored to specific conditions e.g. diabetes or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), or groups such as parents who have had their first baby.

Strategy

Microsoft’s strategy for its healthcare business is based on three main areas:

• building a secure and connected underlying infrastructure for delivering health information;

• advancing collaboration; and • health information modernisation.

According to the Gartner consultancy, around 64 per cent of healthcare ICT budgets in the USA and Europe are spent “just keeping the lights on” e.g. data centres and desktop management. Reducing those costs “enables people to optimise the way they use their infrastructure” and helps to make ICT a strategic asset.

The Asklepios group of hospitals, in Germany, reduced its infrastructure management costs by 36 per cent in one year. This was achieved by implementing practices and tools that Microsoft freely open-sourced through the Connected Health Framework. The savings were reinvested in a telehealth platform using Office Communicator (now Office Lync).

Microsoft’s advancing collaboration work focuses on SharePoint and Lync, to help people access and share knowledge. For example, in England, NICE put together a knowledge management system for all of its users, bringing together 250 sources of information. Clinicians can look for the latest clinical information, either from the British Medical Journal or internal syndicated sources.

Health information modernisation means getting better at digitising the information that’s already available in electronic medical systems, PACs and case management systems. Microsoft works with providers (such as SystemC in the UK) and, in Jordan’s view, these companies are “taking very modern, open architectures to what has typically been a closed shop.”

On top of this work, Microsoft wants to help people take that data and turn it into knowledge with business intelligence tools. Adding dashboards and analysis allows anyone inside the health enterprise to “ask the questions and get the answers that they need out of the data.”

Jordan says that one of the problems has been where people digitised “the processes that they’re already doing today rather than using [ICT] either to re- engineer the processes or to let them get much better business information and intelligence out of those systems.”

Cloud

As ICT in health develops, he expects cloud computing to become “incredibly important for the public sector”. Cloud is sub-divided into:

• a purely public cloud (e.g. Google, Amazon, Microsoft);

• a purely private cloud (virtualisation happening inside data centres); and

• a community cloud (creating effectively a publicly-used but privately-held cloud).

All three sectors have a lot to offer in health. HealthVault and Office 365 can be offered, with stringent security standards, in the public cloud. Private cloud involves simple virtualisation to help people to automate and manage and reduce cost.

In the “middle space” of community cloud, DHSSPS is already considering a service that is secure for all its users. This would follow on from the community cloud email system deployed in the NHS in England.

Collaboration and office support systems are the best entry points for cloud. He comments: “I am predicting that by the end of this year, as much as 30 per cent of the revenues that come from that space will be in cloud-hosted solutions.” Electronic medical records and imaging will be “slower to move over to cloud” but he expects that they eventually will do so.

Jordan notes that cloud is opening up interesting and new services in health. Three areas stand out:

• coding and information;

• image storage; and

• voice dictation and subsequent transcription.

SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms) is used for most coding and information in Northern Ireland. Microsoft has worked with the US firm Health Language to build cloud-based versions of its services so that clinical coding can be done anywhere.

Image storage means not only storing large medical images but also doing large computing cluster analysis of them “without having a super-computer in every office”.

nVoq already offers very high fidelity voice dictation and transcription for health by using cloud.

“As the medical terminology and lexicon changes, they do not need to keep reinstalling new bits of software and so they can interface with the software that’s already there,” he remarks. “Even pretty simple low-powered devices, like smart phones, can take a stream of voice, fire it up to the cloud and then send back some very well translated and transcribed text.”

Ensuring patient confidentiality, of course, will be essential. Microsoft, he says, is “being incredibly diligent and planning for ensuring that data held in the cloud is secure” and also that it complies with national and EU privacy requirements.

Vision

Summing up Microsoft’s future vision for health, he picks out two phrases: connected health, and real impact through connected health.

Connected health incorporates all the different aspects of health ICT, from the consumer space (e.g. Kinect on Xbox) to fitness management, community care, enterprise and government-specific solutions.

Microsoft can “uniquely” work across these areas. He explains: “We need to connect to the ecosystem together and help everyone to learn from each other and to learn about the stories where success has happened and also, frankly, the stories where we’ve not had so much success.”

Impact means taking the broad set of technologies on offer, which are already “relatively commoditised”, and “really focusing on having fast impact so we can prove the value of software in health.” In practice, this involves encapsulating information in free and open source tools and commentaries.

The coming together of telecoms and health care also promises to be “very interesting” with Vodafone already working in that space. That said, technology must be viewed as a means to the end of improving patients’ lives.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in all of this time, it’s about people not about systems,” he reflects. “If you don’t deliver positive experiences and understand the needs of the users that you’re dealing with, you really won’t get any of the systemic benefits that you want to get out of the investments.”

Profile: Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan is the General Manager of the Worldwide Health Group at Microsoft Corp. He was born and educated in the UK, obtaining a bachelor of arts honours degree and then a masters in biological anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He joined Microsoft seven years ago, and for three years he was the head of Healthcare for Microsoft UK, leading the local team working with the NHS in England during the unprecedented National Programme for IT, before joining Microsoft in Redmond, Washington state, to take up his current role.

Jordan is passionate about the positive transformation that technology can provide to the delivery of healthcare in emerging and developed economies. He is equally passionate about the need to measure and prove that value in not-for-profit healthcare economies, where it is all the more vital to ensure that the benefit realized from a budget spent on technology solutions must balance and should significantly outweigh that derived by spending the same budget on procedures, staff and medication.

Before joining Microsoft, Jordan worked for IBM and also spent time building healthcare applications in the UK for the NHS, and also spent a number of years as a professional classical singer, a passion that he attempts to keep alive to this day through performances and teaching.