BRACKNELL, UK - (HealthTech Wire / Opinion by Seann Gardiner) - Centralised licensing agreements for software used in the NHS reduced the burden of managing and paying for licenses for NHS trusts. When some of these were removed last year trusts had to undertake the complex task of auditing all the software that had been distributed across their organisations under the licences to make sure they were legally compliant.Seann Gardiner, EMEA Sales Director, Dell KACE talks about the role of software in the processes around patient care.
Software plays a role in almost all the processes around patient care: from keeping up to date records on each patient, through applications dedicated to each clinical specialism and on to the systems used for communicating across clinical teams and with patients themselves. With such a vast array of software assets to keep track of, many NHS trusts were relieved to be covered by Enterprise Wide License Agreements for widely deployed software packages with vendors such as Microsoft.
However, a number of these License Agreements were either ended or left to run out by the Department of Health during 2010 and now individual organisations are responsible for managing their own license purchasing and compliance. The list of organisations that previously relied on these broad agreements is substantial; covering primary care trusts, strategic health authorities, NHS ambulance trusts and mental health trusts. The change represents a real problem for NHS IT professionals, particularly those that may not have experience managing large volumes of software licenses, and are already stretched for resources across the board.
As license management is handed over, trusts will have to look at how they manage their software in more detail, both to ensure that they are compliant with license requirements and also to look out for opportunities to reduce costs. For NHS bodies that don’t have these skills or the solutions in place to manage software assets well, knowing where to invest in order to meet these requirements will be essential. But where to start?
In this situation, the first rule for software asset management is to know exactly what is being used. Without this information, organisations can have too many or too few licenses in place. This involves auditing what is currently installed on the desktops and laptops across the organisation. Almost all these machines will have copies of the standard Microsoft Office applications, along with software tools like Adobe Reader and Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer. Even if an application is free to download, it will still incur support overheads for keeping it patched and up to date.
Once you have this list of software assets, the next step is to identify what applications are actually being used. This provides the first and biggest opportunity to see where savings can be made, as unused software assets can be removed and the license cost saved. This usage data can be gathered during a ‘listening’ exercise, where application usage is tracked over time. If an application is not used over a given time-frame, say 30 or 60 days, then it can be considered for removal.
The second rule for software asset management involves knowing how best to license software that is needed. There are a huge variety of different software license models in use by vendors, depending on their own business models and how they generate revenue, so understanding this can give you some ammunition when it comes to negotiating budgets.
The most common software licensing method involves knowing the total number of users that might require an application, and then having a license pool based on this number. However, this often results in over-provisioning of licenses and unnecessary cost; someone who might use an application once a quarter is rated in the same way as someone that who uses it daily.
To work around this, organisations can consider either looking at concurrent-user pricing or pay per use models. For concurrent user models, the organisation buys a set number of licenses that are available for users, based on typical usage rates, as it is less likely that all these users will use an application at the same time. This approach can be common when you have shift workers as this can offer a more cost effective approach.
Pay-per-use models can link into the current theme of cloud computing, where the vendors charges for the service as it is accessed, rather than upfront. If the organisation’s staff uses the service more and a higher number of users access the application, then the costs for that month will go up. This can either be run by the application vendor or managed internally if the organisation has a private cloud infrastructure set up.
NHS Trusts can also set up their own Enterprise Wide Agreements with software vendors. This has the advantage of making it easier to get on with the job of supporting clinical staff by removing a pain point around license management. However, organisations should still first ascertain what software assets they have installed and used in order to begin negotiations from a point of strength, rather than weakness.
For more specialist applications covering areas like ward management or niche clinical requirements, costs will remain at the same level, as they tend to be only used by specific groups of users or individuals. Trusts can bring their specific applications into their internal software asset management plan.
When looking at how software assets are managed, it is important to consider this as part of a wider approach to IT management. Once you have a list of IT assets in place, it makes it easier to manage and support those assets going forward. As you have a list of all the devices with a particular application on them it also makes managing patching and updates simpler too.
The next step around this is automating the process. Instead of manually updating applications or updating the list of assets, Trusts can look at tools that can automatically notice changes and update the database. Patches can be pushed to all users that need them, and reports generated covering what is installed. If a desktop update fails to occur for any reason, it can be flagged to the IT team. This makes sure that out-of-date applications do not become a security risk as well.
Looking at IT assets and software licenses for compliance and management reasons will incur a cost to the Trust. Even with Enterprise Wide Agreements in place, there will still be an overhead associated with managing software assets. Instead, organisations should consider using this as an opportunity to look at streamlining how they manage their IT in general, taking out manual processes that don’t deliver any value to the clinical staff community and instead concentrating on helping the staff to be more efficient. In this way, any investment in how the organisation manages its software assets can be linked directly to improved front-line staff performance.
Managing software assets is a big responsibility for NHS organisations to take on, and one that many IT managers have not had to consider until now as so much was done centrally. Improving processes and building skills around software license management is therefore a necessary investment for all NHS bodies, while presenting an opportunity to automate IT processes which can also provide a return on investment.
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Seann Gardiner is EMEA Sales Director of Dell KACE.
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