post-vPro Live Chat.

Hello Members,

The vPro Live Chat held on 30th September and was a huge success. Altogether, we had 4 countries participating, over 10 experts sharing their plentiful knowledge, and vast amounts of queries being posed.

The experts....

Throughout the 2 hour session the vPro experts were asked many a question, for example; how to measure the financial benefits of vPro without implementing (TCO tool), what the usages of vPro are for SMBs and very small fleets of employees, and what they thought the future of vPro looked like.

For a full transcript of the Live Chat - click here.

We would like to thank all of you that participated and hope that your questions were answered. If not, please post a discussion and await a response.

A sneak peak of what's to come...

Xeon Live Chat in November. Further details to be published soon.

Your IT Galaxy Team

One of the fundamental tenets of healthcare delivery is to “first, do no harm,” but what happens when clinicians are inadvertently putting their patients at risk by transferring infection from one place to another? When Intel developed the mobile clinical assistant (MCA) reference design a number of years ago, infection control was one of the key considerations taken into account.

The mobile clinical assistant is a computing platform specifically designed to meet the challenging needs of healthcare professionals by incorporating a number of features designed to be of benefit to patients and clinicians alike. These include built-in barcode and RFID tag readers to help with patient identification and medication management, configurable quick-launch soft-keys for easy application launching and integrated digital camera useful for wound management. However one other feature of importance is the fact that the unit can be easily disinfected because of its sealed design, significant for controlling the spread of hospital acquired infections, such as MRSA, and in minimizing the transmission of illnesses, such as Swine Flu. But how effective is it?

I was involved with a pilot at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, one of the first hospitals in Europe to use the MCA. We ran the trial with its energetic team of phlebotomists and designed it around their daily workflow. We found that using the MCA resulted in a reduction in paperwork, ensured positive patient identification and eliminated unnecessary blood draws. All of this was enabled by the delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time using the MCA. Additionally, after each use, the phlebotomists were able to quickly disinfect the units, simply by wiping them down with alcohol wipes, thus minimizing the risk of transferring infections between patients.

I strongly believe that appropriate technology design can help with solving many of the problems encountered in our daily lives – this is just one example.

The MCA reference design has since been brought to market by a number of manufacturers including Motion Computing, Philips and Panasonic. Further information on the product and additional case studies are available at www.intel.com/healthcare/ps/mca.

We all know IT is a complex business, and is only getting more complex. In this is sort of climate how do you establish best practices to ensure the IT is run optimally and is demonstrating value to the business. IT CMF could be the answer, and to tell us more about it, we caught up with one of its proponents. In the first of a series of regular interviews IT Galaxy talks to Martin Curley, Intel’s Global Director of IT innovation and research, to tell us more. Below are the highlights, and we’ll try and make the full audio available soon.

Can you explain what the IT CMF is and what problem it addresses?
Sure. IT CMF stands for Capability Maturity Framework. It has a very simple focus, although it’s focused on solving a very complex problem. We are trying to create a single, CIO-level tool or playbook that can help the CIO navigate all the many challenges the CIO faces while at the same time improving IT capability and ultimately the value contribution from IT to the business. There’s been a systemic problem around the creation of actually demonstrating the value of what IT investments deliver while also there is a significant history of failures of IT investment. What we want to do by introducing this is help CIOs improve their capability and ultimately improve the predictability, the probability, and the profitability of their IT investments.

What does the framework actually look like, and how is it structured?
In version 1.0 of the IT CMF there are what we call 4 “macro processes”, and underneath those 4 macro processes there are 36 critical processes. You could say that through these 36 critical processes, we’re trying to create a periodic table of the atomic level of the business processes that the CIO needs to manage. At the highest level , the macro processes are: managing IT like a business, managing the IT budget, managing the IT capability, and managing IT for business value. These are essentially arranged in a control loop where budget is your input, managing the IT capability is the IT factory or engine, value is the output, and where we talk about managing IT like a business, here’s where all the strategy, and leadership and governance and a lot of other activities occur.  So: 4 macro processes underpinned by 36  critical processes and for each of these processes we’re identifying 5 levels of maturity. Level 1 is “state-of-the-Ark” and level 5 is “state-of-the-art”. The whole hypotheses is that CIOs can improve the maturity of their processes and as they do they’re able to create more value. We have some empirical evidence and some validation of this in practice.

You mentioned partners; who actually created the framework with you?
The framework was initially developed at Intel by myself and a small team, and we used it to drive a transformation of Intel’s IT organisation. Now we have almost 40 partners. We have 6 different communities involved: the technology ecosystem; enterprise end-users; public sector end-users; the analyst community; CIO associations, and of course academics. Some of the more well-known players that are working with us would be Ernst and Young, SAP, Microsoft BP, and , AXA Insurance. Everybody has recognised that even though technology is moving ahead very fast, the management practices that we use to manage the new technology products have lagged, and that this problem was bigger than any one company, or any one university could solve.

And what do you think is going to be the near-term future of IT CMF, where do you think the next developments are going to be, and who’s going to take it up?
We expect by middle of next year that the full IT CMF version 1 will be released, but we’re also working on a sustainable computing capability maturity framework and we have an internal release process , and the sustainable IT CMF has already achieved a level 2 (and we hope to be at level 3 in September. That means that we actually have a full suite of tools that we can then go pilot with some of the member organisations.

Find out more about IT CMF here, and in the news here.