It’s no wonder that many IT executives drag their feet on cloud computing; it’s a whole new computing paradigm that requires them to look at their jobs—and at IT as a whole—from a totally different perspective. That can be a significant challenge in the context of daily work responsibilities, which is why sometimes the impetus to consider something new like cloud computing requires just that: a fresh perspective.
Reinier de Graaf Groep, the oldest hospital group in the Netherlands, with 500 beds at 6 hospitals in the western region of the country, has learned this first hand. The company recently wrapped up a nearly two-year period in which Ben Gorter, an IT transition specialist, served as acting CIO overseeing the transformation of an IT department that had become a serious handicap. Perhaps the most important tool Gorter relied upon to engineer that transition was a concept that had been totally foreign to the Reinier de Graaf, namely the cloud.
Gorter says that when he arrived on the scene in late 2008, there was a litany of problems. A lack of capital investment in IT had resulted in an operation saddled with aging, obsolete equipment. The IT staff had been whittled down to a skeleton crew that lacked the knowledge needed to run a hospital IT environment. Worse yet, Reinier de Graaf was spending just 2.1 percent of its budget on IT, far below industry norms.
Gorter was able to tackle the last issue by convincing hospital leadership to pump up IT spending to 4.5 percent of the budget, and he’s been assured that will rise to closer to 6 percent in the future. Capital investment dollars remained scarce, however, and Gorter decided to wait on bolstering the staff until he had a clear idea of what was needed. He began to look at applications, and quickly identified his first priority: The hospital’s email system was in dire need of replacement. Given the limited capital available, he suggested that a cloud solution would be cheaper, easier and—most importantly—faster to deploy. And this was coming from a then-self-avowed cloud computing skeptic.
“Initially, I was not so convinced that the cloud was going to have a huge impact,” he says. “But now, I think it will have a very large impact on IT and delivery.”
Gorter’s confidence in the cloud was buoyed by the subsequent success of the cloud-based Microsoft Exchange environment adopted by Reinier de Graaf. That service, hosted by a Microsoft partner, proved to be even more efficient, dependable and available than was hoped, and it emboldened Gorter to make the cloud a larger part of Reinier de Graaf’s ongoing implementation of his IT transformation plan.
The move toward the cloud is progressing to a more comprehensive Microsoft-centric strategy in which the software giant itself will take over hosting of the hospital’s Exchange environment and combine that with cloud-based instances of SharePoint (collaboration), Office Communication Server (presence) and LiveMeeting (web conferencing).
Gorter also has spurred Reinier de Graaf to entrust its hardware and services to an unidentified infrastructure-as-a-service provider, a transition that was set to occur by the end of 2010, and is expected to yield a vastly improved computing capacity at a low up-front cost and with minimal staffing requirements. It also will give the hospital a lot of flexibility to scale its resources up or down should it decide to merge with another hospital, Gorter says.
But such a move is no small consideration when patient data is at issue. That’s why hospital leaders brought in consultants from Ernst & Young to advise them on the contract specifics they’d need to guarantee that patients’ privacy would be adequately protected.
Going forward, Gorter foresees additional opportunities for Reinier de Graaf to tap the cloud, most notably for systems management tools, ERP components such as financials and human resources, and even X-ray systems. (Conversely, he says, hospital systems that contain personal health records won’t go the cloud route any time soon.)
All of the benefits aside, Reinier de Graaf’s cloud strategy hasn’t been without its opponents. In fact, Gorter says that a full one-third of the hospital’s IT department has left due to not wanting to be part of the transition. And those who have stayed have struggled in adapting to a new protocol-intensive approach to IT that allows for less improvisation and independence.
“It’s a very predictable way of working, but IT people have to follow the rules,” says Gorter. “It’s not their best competence, and that’s one of the competencies we’re looking for: You have to follow rules.”
While a rule-oriented cloud environment may not make for an attractive job listing, it does significantly speed up the process of transforming an IT operation, and that was Gorter’s primary goal. He says other IT executives engineering IT transformations would be wise to piggyback on his experience.
“Cloud computing is an opportunity. You can build things on your own, you can buy things on your own, or you can buy services from cloud providers,” says Gorter. “When you want to make a transition very fast, when your problems are very large and very difficult and you need to move quickly, it’s an opportunity you should consider.”
Strong words from a former cloud skeptic.