Analyse this: Microsoft’s infrastructure optimisation tool for the NHS moves online

Microsoft has created an online and NHS-friendly version of its Infrastructure Optimisation tool to help NHS organisations to profile their infrastructures and develop plans to improve them.

IT managers should be able to map the results against the National Infrastructure Maturity Model being developed by NHS Connecting for Health, once it is available. 


Taken as a whole, the NHS has tended to view IT as more of a cost than an asset. Some trusts undoubtedly have excellent IT infrastructures, on which they are starting to build a range of clinical and business applications.

But many more struggle to understand and manage what they have, leaving the IT department “fire-fighting” day to day problems, opening up gaps in security and performance, and making it hard for IT managers to make the case for further investment.

To address these issues, Microsoft has created a new, interactive version of its infrastructure optimisation (IO) tool. This allows NHS organisations to profile their infrastructures and identify steps to improve them.

Online and interactive

“We have been running IO assessments for a while now, but the process has been quite manual,” says Richard Lane, a technical specialist within Microsoft’s UK healthcare team. " “The new tool is online and delivers results more or less instantly.”

“Trusts would download a questionnaire, complete it and send it back to us. We would go through the results and send an assessment back to them. The new tool is online and delivers results more or less instantly.”

The online tool includes more questions and has been more closely tailored to the NHS as a result of feedback from trusts that went through the original assessment process. It can also be used by more than one person.

“What we found from the assessment was that the questionnaire tended to be passed around to a number of departments,” says Mr Lane. “So the online tool allows permissions to be delegated to up to five people.

“We did have one customer who completed the whole thing in less than an hour – but generally, we have found that it takes a couple of hours or half a day in total.”

Core infrastructure

The IO tool looks at three areas. The first is “core” infrastructure and an organisation’s capability in identity and access management, desktop, device and server management, security and data protection and recovery.

Once the relevant questions have been answered, the tool classifies an organisation’s infrastructure as one of four “types” with distinct characteristics. “The IO tool gives you a snapshot of the maturity of your infrastructure and a roadmap to improve it.”

An organisation with a “basic” infrastructure, for example, will have few or badly enforced policies on access and security, will be doing most of its patch management and maintenance manually, and will have high costs yet little understanding of how to improve things.

Whereas organisations with “standardised”, “rationalised” or “dynamic” infrastructure will have progressively more centralised control, more automated management systems and more understanding of how to use IT to deliver business benefits.

“The IO tool gives you two things,” says Mr Lane. “The first is a snapshot of the maturity of your infrastructure and the second is a roadmap to improve it. It will give you projects to consider, the order to tackle them in, and advice and guidance on how to move forward.

“So this is not just about getting more software. A lot of the software that might be recommended is covered by the Enterprise Agreement that Microsoft has signed with the NHS. Instead, it is about using software to generate real benefits.”

Other IO models

The other areas that the tool looks at are business productivity and application platform optimisation.

The first looks at how an organisation is managing communication and collaboration between staff, how well it is managing documents and other content in its systems, and whether its information can be used to generate meaningful “business intelligence.”

The second covers the usability of new applications, how easy it is to develop them, how well application are linked across an organisation and, again, how easy it is to manage data and generate business intelligence (for more information, see link below).

The tool classifies organisations as “basic”, “standardised”, “rationalised” or “dynamic” and gives them a roadmap to improve their maturity in each area.

The Microsoft IO tool and the NIMM

NHS Connecting for Health, the agency in charge of “digitising” the NHS, is working on its own National Infrastructure Maturity Model (NIMM).

This will both give organisations a snapshot of their infrastructure maturity and drive access to the client access licenses in enterprise agreements that it has signed with software companies, including Microsoft.

Wendy Anderson, Microsoft UK’s public sector account technical specialist manager, says it is “well aware” of NHS CFH’s plans. Indeed, she says: “We are working with NHS CFH to develop it and, on its release, to support it.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft is also working to map its IO tool against the NIMM model and is confident that it should be possible for IT managers to read from one to the other.

Ms Anderson says that current indications are that the IO tool will be more detailed than NIMM, so: “We envisage that people will not have to do both, if they have Microsoft environments or are pro-Microsoft in their outlook.”

Infrastructure Optimisation – next steps

Microsoft will be sending an email to NHS IT directors and managers with details of how to access and complete the Infrastructure Optimisation assessments.

If you are an IT director/manager and you do not receive this email by 25 February 2008, please email the NHS Resource Centre online team at nhsweb@microsoft.com with your trust name and email address. A personal email detailing how to access the tool will be sent to you within five working days.