NES Education For Scotland Goes Cloud With ServiceNow

Oct 30, 2015

NHS Education for Scotland (NES) says it's going to deliver a cloud-based solution for digital services delivered both internally and in support of its external stakeholders and partners in the health and social care community across Scotland.

It's working with two partners, CSC subsidiary Fruition Partners and cloud player ServiceNow, to manage HR, facilities management and IT services, as well as support the training and education services delivered by NES.

Once complete, NES expects that the project will deliver considerable improvements in efficiency across the organisation, and set a benchmark for cloud services across the Scottish public sector. That's because it complements an existing self-service portal which speeds employees’ access to many common requests they have, such as computer issues that arise, as well as access to the multiple training management systems and repositories of training materials.

Underlying service management technologies include incident and problem management, change management and a shared knowledge base.

G-Cloud

NES is a special Scottish 'health board' whose primary role is to ensure that those who work in and with NHS Scotland (NHSS) are appropriately trained and developed within regulatory frameworks so that they can provide the best possible healthcare to their patients and their families. It does this by developing and delivering education and training for those who work in NHSS supporting NHS services. Its vision is to provide ‘Quality Education for a Healthier Scotland.’

The organisation appointed Fruition Partners UK, a Master Solutions Partner for ServiceNow, to implement the cloud-based solution, which was sourced via the Government’s G-Cloud supplier framework.

Cloud As A Way To Save Money

The initial roll-out of the ServiceNow IT service management suite was completed within 30 days, fulfilling the first stage of streamlining and integrating IT support across the organisation as part of the UK Government’s ‘Cloud First’ objective of using cloud computing in the public sector to save money and improve efficiency.

For its Interim Director of Digital Transformation Christopher Wroath, “The NES board has set an ambitious goal to create a single cloud-based platform for digital service delivery by August 2016. This project is being supported by Fruition Partners and ServiceNow and forms a core plank of this strategy. It also meets the UK Government’s Cloud First goal to encourage wider adoption of the cloud across the public sector.

“Our plan is to create a unified platform across all our IT systems which delivers a consistent, easy-to-use, ‘consumerised’ experience. We’ve delivered this initially with IT support, based on the ServiceNow platform, and we will soon be extending it to a wide range of other digital services.”

The NES Digital Transformation team is now working on the next phases of development for the cloud-based portal, extending it to other IT functions, HR and facilities management.