Herefordshire NHS and Council has embarked on a shared services agreement with Trustmarque that has enabled the Council to realise a combined cost avoidance of its Microsoft licensing model of £1m over 6 years.
In 2009 Herefordshire Council and NHS embarked on a project to share services across a collection of public sector organisations, bringing together a number of different facilities to collaborate on HR, Finance and IT.
The organisations included Herefordshire Council, Herefordshire Primary Care Trust, the new Wye Valley NHS trust, local and community hospitals, adult social care services, Herefordshire schools, GP practices, and Herefordshire mental health provision from partner Trust 2GETHER.
Cost cutting was the main driving force for partnering with Trustmarque and part of this strategy was to reduce property overheads by introducing flexible ways of working, such as hot-desking and allowing staff in the partnership to work from any location.
This, however, created a licensing issue as traditionally Microsoft licensing is assigned per legal entity. Trustmarque supported Herefordshire to establish the legalities surrounding creating a new legal entity for its licensing and successfully found a solution to this issue.
The public sector organisation in association with Trustmarque created three and six year business plans including cost modelling of what the organisation needed now against its future plans.
The partnership has avoided large reinvestment and upgrade costs across the board, and it now has a license model that will support the future of desktop delivery to the partner organisations.
NHS ICT shared services and Council ICT operations manager Alicia Bolger said she would estimate that they would have spent a million pounds or more over the life of licences across the organisation if they hadn’t had advice from Trustmarque.
"We now have a mature understanding of the future impact of the work we have planned, and how our Microsoft requirements fit in with our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which integrates with our internal management information across the organisations in the partnership," Bolger said.
