Case study: Queensland Health
Business intelligence tools can provide an unprecedented view into an organisation's inner workings, but they can quickly become victims of their own success if they're not constructed carefully.
That point was demonstrated vividly by Queensland Health, which last year began a massive project to re-engineer its four-year-old Clinical Benchmarking Project (CBP).
Initially based on Seagate Software's (now Crystal Decisions') Seagate Info business intelligence platform, CBP had grown to include around 1.5TB of data incorporating minute details of around AU$3 billion worth of annual expenditure on everything from doctors' hours and diagnostic patterns to Band-Aids and lightbulbs.
It had proved tremendously successful in identifying purchasing anomalies, offering dramatic savings such as the identification of a common but unnecessary diagnostic test that was costing one healthcare district over AU$200,000 a year.
The system's cost and resource efficiency were brought into question, however, after it was realised that the BI infrastructureâ€"which moved data back and forth from the Brisbane database across the WAN to client applications at 22 hospitals across the stateâ€"was degrading network performance and introducing unnecessary WAN costs. Creating a single 20MB report generated an average of 500MB of network traffic, since all the back-and-forth communications had to run over the remote link.
-Even when we were utilising the product the way it was meant to be, its impact on the WAN was significant," says CBP principal project officer Glenn Dalton. -We were not succeeding using the current environment because of technical reasons. Even though in one sense the decentralised architecture is relatively easy to use, we needed people at each site who knew how to run the system, roll it out, and run a very large database. We wanted to be able to delegate control of each environment down to individual hospitals."
After hearing that a recent application upgrade would enable a full thin-client interface, Dalton's team drew up a new business case and began restructuring the BI system early last year.
In its new configuration, the Windows 2000-based database and analysis serversâ€"-running Crystal Decisions' Web-based Crystal Enterprise 8.5â€"-are on the same network, eliminating their reliance on costly WAN links.
Reports are generated locally, with the results sent to the user's desktop over the WAN as a tiny HTML file. End users building queries interact with the reporting application via Citrix Metaframe, which uses far less WAN bandwidth than running the native Windows app from the remote server.
The efficiency of the new architecture alone has given Queensland Health net savings of AU$70,000 in the first year alone, as well as saving the organisation AU$250,000 worth of bandwidth capacity that was previously being used to prepare reports.
Despite centralising the database and reporting tools, the new project has maintained administrative independence for the individual hospitals by using Windows 2000's Active Directory to restrict access to BI resources by group.
Local administrators can delegate access to control to their own users according to internal policies, while collaborative interfaces between sites mean hospitals can also compare their performance with Queensland Health best practice by accessing reports from other locations.
