CareLink
It was the NHS ‘Agenda for Change’ initiative that brought together NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions and Carelink. This was the biggest overhaul of NHS-wide pay, terms and conditions in over 50 years. This case study highlights the role that NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions has played in this process.
Background
NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions develops and markets specialised reward software to assist HR Professionals in reward structure design & costing, equal pay and computer aided job evaluation, the area that is of interest here. NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions has established itself as a world leader in the field of reward software tools with over 1000 client installations on four continents.
Challenges
It was the NHS ‘Agenda for Change’ initiative that brought together NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions and Carelink. This was the biggest overhaul of NHS-wide pay, terms and conditions in over 50 years. It was created to harmonise the conditions of service for NHS staff, provide fairer pay based on job evaluation, produce better links between career & pay progression and help to create the correct conditions for many new types of jobs within the NHS. It would affect everyone working in the NHS except for dentists, doctors and senior managers.
Over 900 NHS sites were affected by this scheme and NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions had to take into account that the system would cover about a million NHS employees. NHS HR managers would be the main beneficiary of the application, in assisting them to determine pay grades, but it would also be open to others in the NHS for equality monitoring reasons.
After carrying out the initial pilot studies internally (NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions won the contract for the pilot system in November 2002 and went live with the pilot in May 2003) and having established their needs, NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions began to search for organisations with NHSnet/N3 hosting capabilities since the information that would be available was to only be accessed by those working within NHS organisations. NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions needed a provider that could manage sophisticated IT architectures alongside NHSnet/N3 hosting.
NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions evaluated the 3 national providers of this service. Carelink, the health division of ioko, was chosen due to their experience of providing highly available, redundant and fault tolerant solutions gained from working with over 200 NHS and other health industry organisations providing hosting for, or developing, intranet and extranet sites, building and managing applications or addressing other technology requirements.
‘The company size of ioko was similar to our own and we believed this to be an important factor in choosing who we would work with because we wanted to be a valued customer and have continual two way dialogue throughout the whole process’ Dave Verwer, Chief Technical Officer for NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions
Carelink worked closely with NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions to design and agree the hardware architecture. There were initial concerns that peak time traffic could be extremely high, so the Carelink team had to draw on their experience of providing systems able to cope with very high levels of concurrent usage in order to produce a design that was fit for the task. The solution would also have to be extremely resilient, being continually accessible 24 hours a day 365 days of the year. In addition, because of the presence of a large database of confidential information, the physical security of the system was also an important factor. Carelink’s secure environment, located within the leading data centre facility at Telehouse Docklands (London), ensured that the physical infrastructure could only be accessed by the appropriately authorised personnel. ioko, is also one of only twenty IT companies nationally that have attained the BS7799-2 accreditation, now ISO/IEC 27001: 2005, the globally recognised information security standard from the British Standards Institution (BSI). BS7799 defines the requirements for an Information Security Management System based on conformance and risk analysis of over 127 different controls, which fall under the three main categories of physical security, personnel security and data security. This has lead to ioko being officially certified and registered with the UK Accreditation Services (UKAS).
Carelink carried out the build and installation of the hardware and continue to provide ongoing management of the entire system. There are no third party suppliers involved so Carelink are able to provide NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions with a single point of contact for all service related issues. Carelink can provide the choice of either dedicated or shared platforms providing NHSnet/N3 and Internet connectivity for NHS related organisations to locate their applications without having to take on the costs and overhead of managing the systems themselves; in this case a server farm of dedicated servers was required.
‘We have been burnt a couple of times before by hosting providers with poor support so it is something we checked thoroughly and Carelink passed with flying colours’ Dave Verwer, Chief Technical Officer for NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions
Results
The network diagram was devised for the project and shows how there are 3 network layers. This includes application clusters, clustered databases and overall high availability database mirroring. The highly resilient availability architecture also vitally provided load balancing. This meant that there was no single point of failure and again provided an extra fail safe mechanism in case of emergencies as well as it being monitored 24x7.
The use of the Cisco 11501 content switches greatly simplifies the networking layer and eliminates any routing issues inherent in the previous ‘multi – homed’ implementation. The Cisco 11501 content switches handle the routing of all traffic to both the servers and back via the originating gateway. All server-server communication between the 2 database servers takes place over a dedicated secure VLAN keeping this traffic separate from the “front end” web server traffic. The implementation incorporates hardware and software ‘network load balancing’ and ‘content replication’ using Microsoft ‘Application Centre’. The solution utilises SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 using database mirroring technology to allow quick and easy recovery from a database failure. Both the software and hardware chosen will cater for current and anticipated future needs and can be scaled both up and out without adding any further layers of complexity to the solution.
Future
The full contract was won in August 2004 and was ready to be rolled out within budget and within schedule by 1st January 2005. Currently more than 430 000 positions have been evaluated by up to 5500 concurrent system users.
The system is proactively maintained in order to avoid the occurrence of incidents due to routine usage. This includes such things as applying security and OS patches and monitoring disc usage and processor usage. It is also monitored 24x7 so that if incidents do occur, Carelink receive immediate notification through their 24x7 Service Desk and are able to take whatever action is necessary in order to rectify them. Carelink’s services operate within the ITIL framework, providing a controlled and well-managed environment that enables the delivery of the highest possible standard of service. NorthgateArinso’s uptime, including scheduled downtime, has been 99.4% and there has been no unscheduled downtime since the system went full scale.
‘As far as we are concerned, the whole project has been very successful. When we have had problems, the response to report calls has been excellent. Whenever we have logged an incident with the Carelink Service Desk, Carelink employees jump on the problem and find out what’s going on immediately. We feel valued because when we ring up there’s always someone there saying we’re looking into it right now. We have built good relationships with Carelink members of staff. Not only are they very knowledgeable about specific areas, they also know about our servers and our problems. We don’t have to explain it all every time’ Jamie Jones, Senior Implementation Engineer for NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions.
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