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The collaboration conundrum and how to fix it

Alastair Mitchell, president and co-founder of Huddle, the enterprise cloud collaboration service, discusses the role of technology and cloud computing in delivering the aims of the Five Year Forward View.

NHS England’s Five Year Forward View is an exciting, inspiring and ambitious plan to drive our NHS forward. Aside from specific initiatives around investment, public health measures and local service changes, the major theme running through the Forward View is that of ‘collaboration’. The NHS is attempting to fundamentally change the way in which its staff will work together in the future.

But what does this mean in practice and are NHS employees and their organisations ready?

Collaboration: the new NHS imperative

The Forward View holds aloft an NHS built on a foundation of flexibility, integration and efficiency. It advocates an environment where diverse teams of talented colleagues collaborate across specialities, geographies and organisations. At its core, the Forward View is pushing a new way of working that underpins NHS service evolution to provide better health outcomes.

The key word here is ‘collaboration’. But getting dozens, hundreds, thousands of collaborative relationships up and running is a hugely challenging task. And as numerous Cabinet Office policies and initiatives will confirm, the only way the government thinks collaboration can practically work across the public sector is to use cloud computing platforms. Why? Cloud platforms are quick, scalable, flexible to deploy and are coupled with robust security measures and a full audit trail. They’re perfect when working with people inside and outside an organisation’s IT structure. And after numerous high-profile IT disasters, the public sector in general – and the NHS in particular – needs to change its approach.

Is the NHS ‘cloud-ready’?

Any change in core system – such as a shift to cloud platforms – and corresponding ways of working represents a huge cultural shift for any organisation, whether public or private. But it’s the scale and the complexity of the NHS that makes change that much more challenging. The NHS isn’t just a massive and complex organisation: it’s dozens of massive and complex organisations.

To better understand the readiness of the NHS to embrace cloud collaboration, Huddle commissioned Dods Research to investigate the attitudes of more than 2,000 NHS employees towards cloud computing. The findings demonstrate that the NHS still has a way to go to achieve the Forward View.

First, only 66% of NHS staff are aware of cloud computing (the lowest amongst the public sector). Also, 27% are not confident using cloud services and 36% reported never using cloud computing. In sum just a third of NHS staff are confident using cloud services. The NHS is far from ‘cloud-ready’.

The collaboration conundrum

The study suggested that 96% of NHS staff share information between internal and external teams as part of their work, but the way in which ‘collaboration’ takes place today is anachronistic. For example, of NHS employees surveyed:

• 47% print and post physical copies of documents to people they’re working with
• 25% use couriers to deliver hard copy documents
• 20% rely on USB drives

This is slow, expensive and unsecure. What’s more, this kind of behaviour is totally at odds with the working practices advocated by the Forward View.

The NHS’s lack of confidence in cloud computing is undermining its own ability to evolve. If this situation does not change, the NHS risks being locked into inefficient, insecure and outmoded working practices, putting the Five Year Forward View at risk.

How NHS executives can address the collaboration conundrum

Fundamentally, moving to the cloud is a cultural, not a technological evolution.

NHS executives and their IT leaders can make this work, or they can miss an opportunity to create more positive change in the NHS than any policy or manifesto imagined. We’d advocate:

1. Building awareness and confidence in cloud computing by demonstrating relevance and cracking down on protectionist behaviour by NHS IT departments
2. Complying with the new security classification system by interpreting Cabinet Office guidance and using pre-certified commercial collaboration platforms
3. Embracing G-Cloud and working with SMEs in a way that helps boost user confidence in cloud platforms

Meeting the ambitious demands of the Forward View was never going to be easy, but enabling mass collaboration is an exciting challenge for NHS executives and IT leaders. We’d back them to succeed and for the Five Year Forward View to deliver on its fantastic promise.