Situation
A leading healthcare system was tasked with consolidating their decentralized data centers into a new centralized state of the art facility. A business case was built internally but was not validated by a third party. Midway into the project, CloudLogic identified that the costs estimated to consolidate a key facility that hosted many of the key clinical systems, including the EMR/EHR environment, had been grossly underestimated. The CIO was asked by the Board to identify cost savings measures across the budget, including headcount reduction to fund the overage. One of the CIO’s key priorities was their team. A significant amount of time, effort and money had been invested in creating a cohesive team and building their skills to support the new technologies that the organization was implementing to innovate in their industry and enable scale. Cutting staff would be devastating to future initiatives and morale. The CIO needed to find solutions to the business challenge while maintaining the team.
Where to start
The CIO and the VP of Clinical Systems convened their Leadership, Procurement and Finance teams, inviting CloudLogic to participate as a strategic partner. The agenda was simple: Find material savings in the current IT spend that could be realized quickly, while preserving the team. CloudLogic’s Portfolio Optimization offerings were a natural fit. The group agreed and CloudLogic focused on Data Center Optimization with a goal of realizing results within 9 weeks.
Key Success Criteria
1. We would meet or exceed the savings threshold the CIO defined
2. The first round of savings must be identified and approved for implementation within 9 weeks
3. Nothing was sacred, all options were to be evaluated and presented to the executive team
4. The changes must be able to be implemented without negative impact to business operations
5. Significant outages were not allowed during the process
6. The environment must retain the existing core functionality and flexibility to support the business demands now and in the future.
Challenges and Solutions
Timeline of Project
1. Establish Program Team, Guiding Principles and Goals – Week 1
2. Deploy an agentless discovery tool – Week 1
3. First round of identified savings opportunities – Week 3
4. Second round of identified savings opportunities – Week 6
5. Results and approved business case – Week 9
Lessons Learned
1. IT spend should be maintained and assessed continuously, engage trusted advisors early on in the process
2. A tool alone does not adequately address the complexities of total cost of ownership, leveraging experience-based analysis is key to unlocking results
3. Getting material results is a team effort and is achievable
Client Situation Today
This enterprise exceeded the CIO’s goals for cost savings in record time. There was no reduction in IT staff. The true value of this engagement was the institutional change that was implemented to create a secure and resilient environment for the EMR/EHR systems and an on-going process to manage this valuable asset. CloudLogic continues to be tightly integrated with this client and continues to uncover additional savings and deliver value on-prem, offsite and in the cloud.
