FROM THE FRONT LINE
Leeds' head of city ICT strategy and solutions, Rob McNally, reports that the council has reached a significant milestone in the Leeds ‘Community Cloud’ programme
From November 2020 a project was led at rapid pace to migrate Leeds Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Leeds Community Healthcare (LCH) from their physical server infrastructure based in north Leeds into the Azure cloud.
Design and implementation of the programme was architected by Leeds City Digital Partnerships Team - with the new Azure environment now being supported by the council’s digital information service (DIS).
The achievement should be especially acknowledged in the current circumstances as many of the teams and our colleagues from the CCG and LCH are also working hard on Covid-19 activities; supporting delivery of the vaccine and keeping essential services running.
The team drove things forward swiftly, leveraging our collective skills in management, infrastructure, networking, security, communication and design.
Alongside our delivery partner (Softcat/UBDS) we were able to undertake the migration in and around the Christmas period. This was a challenging time to deliver the piece of work but it led to minimal impact on our front line services, which was a key requirement for us.
Our CCG supports nearly 100 GP practices across Leeds, and LCH has a workforce of around 3,000 staff, primarily based in the community. To move these two organisations to a cloud-based infrastructure in a matter of weeks, without any serious disruption or downtime (touch wood!) was a really well executed piece of work.
This project has also shown how adaptable we can be in adopting new technologies and gaining new skills and experience.
Having two prominent health and care organisations coming together to work with Leeds City Council and deliver a shared outcome is testament to the city’s ambition and commitment towards partnership working.
Now that we have established a cloud presence for both the CCG and LCH, I am confident that this platform provides the flexibility and scale that we will need in the future to support digital transformation across the whole city.
Well done to all IT and digital staff involved across the organisations and the City Digital Partnership.
Rob McNally is joining the UKA Live discussion panel on 19th February: Capitalising on Cloud. Register here now to join us live from 11:00 to 12:00 next Friday morning
From the front line is a new editorial section on UKAuthority sharing updates and views from the frontline public sector technology community. Send reports from the front line to UKAuthority publisher, Helen Olsen Bedford: helen@ukauthority.co.uk
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