PERSPECTIVE APPLIED IT
the more popular Agile development methodologies, consisting of two-week iterations and daily stand-up meetings involving representatives of the user community. This, says Shaw, was intended to “reconnect with the users of the service, understand their key priorities, which had moved on significantly since the start of the project, then generate a momentum of delivery that would address these priorities”.
MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL The resulting system is known as the ‘Book of Views’. A web-based portal hosted in a BT facility in Leeds, it condenses a range of highly technical data into a graphical view of the current status of all the relevant systems. It allows users to analyse the historical performance of each service, enabling them to predict the likely impact of such events as applications upgrades or software patches. It also offers the option to subscribe to email-based alerts, meaning that incidents can be identified as quickly as possible.
The NMS, complete with the Book of
Views, is today used by a variety of organisations across the NHS to monitor all
manner of services. Shaw reports that it is particularly well adopted by IT staff monitoring RiO, an application designed to support mental and community healthcare operations that is operated by BT. “The NMS dashboard provides a red-
amber-green status, updated every five minutes, for the performance of the application for each individual NHS trust,” he explains. “That gives users an impression of their own performance compared with neighbouring trusts, and allows them to drill down to see the volume of user sessions, the number of users impacted by errors and the performance of each page of the application at their own trust. “In the case of Lorenzo, NMS provides a
detailed view of end-to-end business process timings, allowing trust users to compare local performance to the national average.”
POSITIVE FEEDBACK Shaw points to testimonials from users describing the value of the system. Lee Rucker, head of service management for the NHS’s London programme for IT, has said NMS has made a “huge difference”, for example. “We are able to see issues in near
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real time, and the service provides the ability to determine accurately both the duration and the scale of impact on end- users. Feedback from trusts has been extremely positive.” And, despite their initial reservations,
suppliers have found NMS to be beneficial too. “NMS has enabled us to effectively manage customer perception regarding system performance, to swiftly identify and resolve application performance issues, proactively identify and prevent application issues and to easily define ownership regarding customer internal issues,” a BT spokesperson has said. The future of NPfIT and NHS Connecting
for Health is not entirely certain. The present government has pledged to cut back public sector IT spending, but how much can be changed at this late stage remains to be seen. But Shaw believes that the NMS will
continue to be used to monitor IT services, “irrespective of what the organisation may look like in future. Having the ability to monitor these systems will continue to benefit any organisation, whether it’s managed locally or centrally.”
INFORMATIONAGE APRIL2011 33
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