Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity (GOSHCC)
Hospital Charity's Bold Fundraising Goal Requires Integrated IT System Based on Sun Java Composite Application Platform SuiteGreat Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity raises funds to support the needs of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust, a national centre of excellence in children's health care. GOSHCC delivers the widest range of specialist paediatric care in the UK. Each year, the charity funds the purchase of equipment, accommodations for staff and patient's families, support services, research and staff training. GOSHCC also contributes toward providing state-of-the-art research facilities for the hospital's research partner, the Institute of Child Health, which is part of University College London. Every year, GOSHCC needs to raise £50 million through charitable donations. Customer Challenges
SolutionBecause achieving its ambitious five-year fundraising goal would mean processing twice as much in donations than in typical years, GOSHCC deployed Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) to gain the productivity, flexibility and systems integration necessary for this important undertaking. Business Results
Story DetailsGOSHCC has set its sights on rebuilding and refurbishing much of the site that is shared by the hospital and the institute. To achieve this, the charity needs to double the amount of funds it typically raises, to £50 million per year— and revamp its business processes and underlying IT systems to support this enormous effort. “We needed to widen the scope of our work to be able to support the increase in activities and to improve process efficiency,” explains Mark Saldanha, head of IT for GOSHCC. “We wanted to minimize the size of the development team needed to support our three-year integration strategy and needed to find a solution that would facilitate this.”
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Our three-year strategy is to develop solutions based on a service-oriented architecture, and Sun's Java Composite Application Platform Suite enables us to do that. We've found that we can develop much more complex solutions than was previously possible and at much lower risk. We couldn't be happier with Sun Java CAPS.
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— Mark Saldanha, Head of IT, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity
After evaluating all of the relevant products available, GOSHCC opted to go with the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). “We felt that there was no compromise with the solution because it offers both world-class integration and business process management— and no other vendor could provide that,” said Saldanha. Rather than work with a third-party channel partner that would require hundreds of hours of coding time to accomplish the task, Saldanha preferred to work directly with Sun. “Sun had a plan to make us self-sufficient and able to develop and support our applications without huge increases in development resources, Saldanha said. Since starting its initiative in July 2005, GOSHCC has launched about half a dozen different parallel projects. The goal of all these projects is to improve the donor experience. One project involved integrating GOSHCC's Web site with its back-office systems to support online donations, while another entailed integrating its customer relationship management (CRM) system with its finance applications. In both instances, the charity is using the J2EE-compliant Sun SeeBeyond eGate Integrator component of Java CAPS to integrate the applications together, provide messaging functionality and guarantee that transactions will be completed once they have been initiated. The charity has also deployed Sun SeeBeyond eInsight Business Process Manager to create process flows, while the Sun SeeBeyond eVision Studio is being used to build web-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Meanwhile, GOSHCC is reworking the underlying business processes now supported by Java CAPS. Although the overall project is expected to take three years to complete, Saldanha believes that removing functional silos and automating time-consuming manual tasks will help increase staff productivity and efficiency by preventing duplication of effort. From an IT point of view, the charity is experiencing several benefits of deploying Java CAPS. The first is that the five-member IT team is able to undertake many more innovative projects than was previously possible. “We're very ambitious as an organization and can now pretty much support any envisaged activity. In the past, we just had to say no or explain that it was too costly to introduce, Saldanha says. “Initially, because we knew Sun provides very scalable solutions, we were a bit concerned that Java CAPS would be too much for us or would end up being overkill. But it's incredibly easy to use and deploy. Implementation is easy without the complications of separately installing an application server, integration engine, web services directory and the like. Java CAPS also enables us to undertake incremental integration rather than a big bang approach with all the inherent risks associated with large projects like that. After our experiences, I'd have no problems recommending this solution to another charity,” Saldanha says. |
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