Regional NHS Health Trust

The Client, a Welsh NHS Trust, was due to lose a Data Centre due to boundary changes. The remaining Data Centres and a Server room were aged and requiring significant investment to allay regulatory and economic challenges.

PTS was engaged to assist the Client, to understand the local, regional and national needs of the organisation as well as meet with the key stakeholders responsible for delivery of technical and clinical outcomes across the Trust. Ensuring that the documented digital strategy of the Trust aligned with the digital infrastructure supporting it. Providing a future state recommendation with a roadmap supporting the Client journey.

Governance Structures

PTS built an excellent, collaborative relationship with the Client, which helped to ensure that key stakeholders were fully engaged with the project and that the Client worked well with the PTS team. By ensuring that an open, trusting approach was in place throughout the Client interviews and a specific technical workshop, PTS was able to provide a robust strategy document that met the needs of senior management in putting forward a business case for gaining the budget needed to proceed.

The Analysis Process

PTS has worked with a significant number of different clients, both in the private and public sectors, advising on IT and digital infrastructure strategies. This in-depth knowledge of how to combine business outcomes with digital infrastructures needed to support them, enabled PTS to ask the right questions in 1-1 meetings or wider workshops to ensure recommendations were appropriate and flexible enough for changing digital landscapes, but also robust in supporting technological advances in Internet of Things (IoT) and the use of hybrid cloud strategies. To ensure that stated facts and suppositions were validated, PTS matched its thinking and analysis back with the Client frequently.  The scope included a technical review of the existing Data Centre infrastructure along with previous studies commissioned by the client from other consultancies.

In many respects, the Client was operating at a professional level that is unusual in the Public Domain, however, like many Public Sector bodies, it needed to get the most out of its skilled resources within a limited budget and therefore needed a cost-effective route to more economic delivery of IT while maintaining quality standards of services and support.

PTS aligned the local capabilities of the Client with the need to be part of the National Agenda, while also ensuring that its regional links were fully accommodated. A paradigm shift from totally on-premise to hybrid cloud along with on-premise Data Centres provision, was fundamental to delivering a strategy that the Client could use to demonstrate that it both understood and supported the All-Wales National Strategy, with the flexibility to change and adapt if required.