Our customers share their stories of successful collaboration
Case
Enabling a business transformation with a skillful change management approach
ZuidZorg is an extramural care provider offering a range of healthcare services, including elderly care and an emergency monitoring center. We assisted them in migrating to a modern digital workplace, based on Chromebooks, Google G-Suite, OKTA for identity and access management, Amazon AppStream for the delivery of Windows applications, and server hosting on AWS. Following our “big bang” implementation, the adjustment period lasted less than a month. In addition, with the IT solution and the users supported by Cambrian’s healthcare certified Managed Services, IT became significantly more robust and seamlessly integrated into the background for users.
"We moved to AWS and Google, redesigned security, replaced the software applications supporting the primary business processes and outsourced many support processes. We achieved savings of 2.1 million yearly on an annual turnover of 90 million. We were looking for people who did not necessarily come from the healthcare sector but who understand the sector, and who have affinity with it. And we needed someone who had the mettle and tenacity to push through the changes: ours is a traditional company with a conservative outlook. And during the bumpy patch that hits you when you migrate, Cambrian held firm and displayed confidence. I am very pleased about that."
The customer
ZuidZorg is an extramural care provider offering various healthcare services such as elderly care, children care and a monitoring centre. ZuidZorg employs 1,400 healthcare professionals and a significant backoffice who are active in the region around Eindhoven.
The challenge
The management team of ZuidZorg had decided to move away from a traditional environment based on VMWare, Citrix-based workplaces, and Active Directory in combination with Microsoft Office hosted on-premises. The new digital workplace was selected, based on Chromebooks, Google Workspace, OKTA for identity and access management, Amazon AppStream for the delivery of various Windows applications and AWS for the hosting of servers.
The transition approach had to minimize the risk of disruptions in ZuidZorg’s day-to-day healthcare service delivery, despite the comprehensive and significant changes. The before and after architectures provided a radically different user experience. Furthermore, the starting point consisted of services and systems that were tightly integrated. These aspects made a gradual migration close to impossible. On the other hand, a quick transition presented its own challenges: change management support for the users, data migration and fewer roll back possibilities, and several supplier handovers to be orchestrated seamlessly in a compact time frame.
The solution
Key to the migration success was the decision to leave all business applications initially unchanged and focus on supporting the users with their changes to authentication, their desktop and the office collaboration applications. Changes to business applications were planned in a second phase. In addition, an accelerated onboarding process for Cambrian’s Managed Services added a safety net for unforeseen or sudden issues and support requests during and after the cutover.
A pilot migration group was set up to identify any unforeseen issues and optimise the change management approach. The findings allowed the organisation to migrate in one ‘big bang’. This offered three significant benefits:
- The organisation was not split and everyone continued collaborating with one set of tools.
- Users were not confronted with a long period of continuous disruptive changes and could settle down quickly and go back to business.
- The organisation faced limited double running costs.
Once the organisation went live we nevertheless faced some small surprises; for example undocumented edge cases of users depending on legacy tools implemented locally. Running the infrastructure on AWS and working with an experienced AWS Managed Service Provider proved valuable. Readily available out-of-the box tools such as Amazon AppStream and Windows VDI’s allowed us to resolve such issues immediately and continue the transition.
After the swift migration, a comprehensive set of managed services was onboarded to optimize the support and to coordinate the services that were outsourced to best in class third party providers in the various service areas.
The results
After the big bang, onboarding our ISO 27001 and ISO 27799 certified managed services, and adjusting to the new normal took less than a month. As a result, IT became much more robust and faded into the background for the users:
- Before the migration, users generated approximately 950 IT specific incidents every month (excluding business application related incidents). This number dropped by 95% to 50 incidents per month. This is a huge quality improvement for the front line of the organisation: the nurses and doctors who want to spend their time on their patients, no longer have to waste valuable time on IT-related issues.
- The change also resulted in a significant drop in ZuidZorg’s Total Cost of Ownership for IT by circa 65%, and a much more efficient IT delivery to the organization with a much smaller team.
- Another tangible benefit was improved cost transparency of IT services and agility in adjusting their consumption. Part of the overall business transformation at Zuidzorg involved the sale of unprofitable activities. The public cloud made cost allocation totally transparent and in addition, resources that belonged to a divested business unit could easily be shut down or separated and transferred to the new owner.
> Learn more about rethinking the cloud strategy for ZuidZorg in ‘architecting lean IT‘.
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