When your organisation supports more than 450,000 people across 460 locations in Australia through its private hospitals, aged care homes, foster care homes, and retirement villages, relying on spreadsheets to keep track of your paperwork is not really an option – now the Not for Profit has found an innovative solution.
ZD Net reports Uniting Care is working with a software company Citadel on ways to implement cloud-based data storage systems to keep tabs on its application portfolio and clean up its data.
At last count, the organisation had around 280 known applications, 350 different IT components, and 190 different application providers.
Speaking at the digital APAC Gartner Symposium 2020, Uniting Care Queensland architecture services manager Ross Francis said the “spiralling complexity” caused by “mountains of spreadsheets” had prompted the four-week trial of a data store solution called LeanIX, which gave it visibility of its application portfolio for the first time.
“What we really got a view of was where that risk was for each of our sectors across our organisation. In hospitals we now understand what the risk is there, we understand in our aged care and community sector service what the risk is there, and we also understand in our family and disabilities area what the risk is there,” Francis said.
“Those reports are now extremely easy to produce. Before, you’d be spending hours just to produce a spreadsheet to provide a report back to the leadership team about what our actual risk is in any one of those areas.”
Important to remember that digitisation was one of the recommendations made by the Counsel Assisting at the Royal Commission’s final hearing, with Senior Counsel telling the Commissioners the sector “remains in the Dark Ages”.
