previous ‘sales-driven’ blog, about developing Cloud solutions in line with live customer opportunities, here’s a quick snapshot of RFPs currently live on Merx for the Canadian government.
Online, integrated CRM for Healthcare and local government Citizen Service are key growth areas, with a number of opportunities that I have distilled into the following Cloud solution programs that can meet their needs:
Cloud BCP
Healthcare Community Clouds
Open Government Citizen Service Platform
Cloud computing can be used as a common delivery platform for each of these scenarios, presenting considerable opportunity for IT outsourcing providers.
1. Cloud BCP
Recently there has been a variety of industry dialogue about the disconnect between the hype of Cloud Computing and the actual realities, like how much it is translating into sales revenues. A key part of this disconnect comes from a sales strategy based only on installing Cloud software and then hoping it will simply sell itself.
Instead the key is to leverage Cloud computing as an enabling technology to tailor new solutions to address already established markets.
For example the core capability of Cloud is the ability to virtualize multiple hardware in disparate data-centres into a single logical, multi-site instance of computing, ideal for the types of Business Continuity services that Ontario Shores is looking for.
2. Healthcare Community Clouds
This need for more consolidated infrastructure is a key theme in Healthcare.
A critical challenge for government is the lack of skills for important applications, like the widely used Meditech system in the healthcare sector. In the smaller and more remote communities they don’t have the local IT skills required to support these complex enterprise apps in their hospitals.
Hence the model of ‘Community Clouds’ discussed in the Canadian Cloud Roadmap is key, an approach where collaborating organizations amalgamate their requirements and satisfy them through a shared services program.
The fundamental benefit of Cloud computing is exactly the ability to implement this principle, it can consolidate multiple hardware and software environments into one.
Healthcare in particular is a well established user of this model. The 3SO organization advertising this RFP for new incident management software is itself an example, a shared services organization for a number of collaborating hospitals, and thus an ideal host for their shared Cloud applications.
Other Healthcare projects include Clinical mobile applications for the Ottawa Hospital, a Patient Home Monitoring system for Ontario TeleMedicine, a Community-Wide Scheduling Application for Ontario Shores, and Alberta needs to plan more spending too.
A Healthcare Community Cloud platform would offer each of these organizations the opportunity to concentrate and maximize their individual investments.
3. Citizen Service Platform
In a similar manner the City of Ottawa is looking to deploy a common, shared Citizen Service Platform that can unite all of their service departments into a consistent customer experience.
Like most large organizations the city operates an estate of legacy applications to provide services like permits, licencing, police enforcement dispatch and incident tracking, maintenance scheduling and so forth, and they want to provide a singuar user interface to these via 311 call centres, web sites, kiosks, counters, emails, mobile other access channels for their residents, achieving an integrated Citizen Service Management (CSM) solution.
This is a significant technology challenge.
The legacy estate features major applications like SAP for the bulk of their ERP needs, which runs on a Solaris/Oracle platform, and then also each of the smaller departments typically runs their own dedicated software package for their particular business process needs, whether that be the parks inventory or property listings. Each needs integrated into this environment.
Other technologies are also in the mix such as Citrix and VPNs for enabling and securing access, and all of this must be integrated together via a universal logical model to achieve this overarching customer-centric integration, linking in their VoIP infrastructure and Ottawa.ca web site for customer interactions, as well as providing core central functions like a single electronic payment system.
Open Government – The Pothole Report
In addition to the integrated CRM strategy requested in this RFP, a relatively ‘traditional’ and well established strategy, government agencies are now also obliged to consider and implement an ‘Open Government’ program too, as described in the resolution from the Privacy Commissioner.
This adds the additional challenge and requirement that not only should these customer services be unified, but that the customers themselves should now play an integral part in the service delivery itself, via Open Data and other online participative models.
One example is “The Pothole Report”. Using spatial data and online maps customers can identify and prioritize potholes and how they can be fixed.
Source:http://www.sys-con.com/node/1645637
