Digital workspace programme to unify online experience at Health NZ

eHealthNews.nz: National Systems & Strategy

Digital workspace programme to unify online experience at Health NZ

Wednesday, 13 March 2024

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

All of the 90,000 employees at Health New Zealand – Te Whatu Ora will have a single identity, email address and desktop experience wherever they are in the country as part of a digital workspace programme underway at the organisation.

James Allison, director of digital enterprise services, says the goal of the programme is to ensure there is no technology-related barrier or boundary to how Health NZ staff can work together and collaborate.

“We are working to ensure all of our people are identified and all of their access to systems and doors is then enabled for the enterprise. Also, a common look and feel to all the desktops, getting us all on the same email and on the same Teams tenancy,” he says.

More than 1000 people have been migrated to the new national desktop and the target is to have everyone on Office365 by the middle of this year.

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All staff are being moved to a common email address and Health NZ is actively replacing any laptops, tablets and PCs that are older than five years.

Data shows there are around 70,000 devices around the country and a significant number are too old to run modern applications.

Allison says the replacement programme will address some of the tech debt by removing older assets and having common supported releases. When working in Canterbury he encountered devices that were still running Windows 7 in order to run a heart monitor app.

Health NZ is also rolling out a common WiFi to allow staff to use the new national desktop no matter what facility they are at. Previously, the zero-trust model meant staff could not connect to local networks when moving around the country.

Allison says Health NZ has come together as a single entity, but is still running 28 different entities with their own IP addresses and different methods of identifying people and roles.

“Most of them have an active directory structure, but they are not all joined up, so we are moving to a national identity solution,” he explains.

“This means if you work for us, you will be in our identity and we will use that identity for the provision of the services that you consume, everything from payroll to which applications you can access and what buildings you can enter.”

After an RFP process, Health NZ chose SailPoint to provide the identity solution.

“We intend to have the identity platform ‘piped in’ in April,” says Allison.

Another stream of work is focused on moving to an enterprise Content Management System (CMS), which will have initial deployment before June.

This involves moving away from around 30 SharePoint sites and Lotus Notes in use across the motu towards a modern set of tools and products around enterprise content.

“There is a whole lot of replication and duplication and redundant data, so it is a really big programme of work to shift us to a new enterprise CMS,” Allison says.

The digital workspace programme is also implementing a national IT helpdesk and is deploying a new national telephony platform and national service desk platform.

This will enable the help team to log and track calls and ultimately get consistent Incident Management and Major Incident Management escalation through the platform, he says.

The national helpdesk will provide a 24/7 service across the country, with calls moved to another part of the country if a local team is too busy to respond.

“It is about moving to a national distributed capability and how we leverage that to build and access skills around the country,” Allison says.

The national helpdesk deployment starts this month and the aim is to have all services on it by the end of June.

Allison says deployment of national services will enable far more automation or self service, which will come in ‘wave 2’ of the project.

“There will be some automation delivered this year but the primary focus is on implementing a single platform,” he says.