CRANFIELD
IT LEADERSHIP
PROGRAMME
CASE STUDY
The National Institute for Clinical Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Network (CRN) is the clinical
research delivery arm of the Department of Health. Today the organisation is governed by over 70
hosting contracts across the NHS; in April 2014 this will reduce to 15 as the CRN implements a
transition programme that will simplify the structures for clinical research in the NHS.
Information Systems can provide
significant benefits to the research
networks within the NHS through
improved ways of working.
Richard Corbridge the Chief Information
Officer for the NIHR CRN believes that
key learning delivered by the Cranfield IT
Leadership Programme has enabled him
and his team to put in place structures,
strategies and priorities over the last 18
months that have provided a stronger
foundation to enable the development of
key delivery elements.
“When tasked with something as big as
the organisational change we faced, we
decided to ensure that we worked from a
benefit point of view and tried desperately
to stay away from the technology element
until we knew what benefits we were
trying to deliver”. We based our approach
on key learning from Cranfield and used
case studies discussed during the course,
through a ‘lessons learnt’ log, to ensure
we did not fall in to the regular IT project
traps.
The NIHR CRN wants to make England
the ‘go to’ location for integrated clinical
research and trials. It plans to make the
proposition the NHS has to offer the route
for underpinning elements of the UK
economic recovery. The CIO went on to
comment, “Crucial to successful transition
of our structures are the business benefits
that our IT systems can expose; the
data we hold is key, but only if the data
hidden can be unlocked and becomes
information.” Over the last 6 months the
organisation has adopted a mantra for
the delivery of its Information Systems;
"Collecting data to build information that
delivers insight and creates business
intelligence."
The organisation has created a number of
initiatives that are all moving forward at a
rapid pace and all with a delivery date of
‘now’. The CIO was asked if this was by
design, a happy accident or too much to
deliver? “It has certainly been an exciting
time”, he commented, “being enabled
and supported by our organisation over
the last 12 months to do this work has
meant that between now and December
we have a new system, or major release,
going live every single month, and that’s
not down to agile delivery or a new way
of working. Instead it is down to the
business supporting our delivery and
remaining committed to the benefits they
have identified and want to achieve from
this new exciting world."
"The knowledge gained at
Cranfield, in a safe environment,
and the experiences that the IT
Leadership Programme provides,
have meant that we have been
able to plan for this change
against a back drop of enhanced
knowledge and learning."
The success that the NIHR CRN has
achieved to date has been from the
development of a clear Information
Strategy, established in conjunction with
the business and approved quite uniquely,
by the Clinical Directors responsible
for the country’s research capability.
Richard explained this process as “like
a light bulb going on in the dark; by
involving clinicians in the development
of the strategy and ensuring some of
the great visualisation principles of our
organisation’s lean programme were
applied in practice, the approval of the
strategy by the Clinical Directors was
found to be relatively simple. I distinctly
remember the module on creating IS
strategy at Cranfield; there was much
debate about what an IS strategy was,
whether it was technology, systems, or
information led and the benefit of each.
One of the brightest memories was the
discussion on gaining business buy-in; in
my course notes I literally began to create
our strategy for gaining buy-in based on
what was being discussed during the
module.”
The organisation has a good
understanding of what is being delivered
and in particular knows how to articulate
what it needs. “When you have 10,000
funded resources working throughout
the NHS who all need a piece of your
systems, you learn quickly to make sure
you listen hard to what the ‘customer’
wants”.
“The business we work in understands
the concept of ‘Actionable Insight’; after
all, they work in research and therefore
the ‘sales pitch’ to improve our IS to
deliver this was far easier than many
would expect!” The NIHR CRN used
this interest to deliver an information
platform that is known as the ‘Open >>>
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Data Platform’, a single source of the
truth with regard to the performance of
clinical research across England. The
organisation awarded the delivery of the
framework of this to QlikView and then
built upon it until the various ‘apps’, that
are now available for access to clinical
research performance information, now
make up a clinical research ‘app store’.
However the NIHR CRN couldn’t stop
at the icing on the information cake, it
needed to revolutionise how it collected
data and turned it into information;
“that’s where the new Central Portfolio
Management System (CPMS) comes
in, a system that Tribal Education were
commissioned to deliver in December
2012. The system is the first truly modern
IT system that has been used to manage
clinical research in this country and is
sparking significant global interest. The
NIHR CRN has reused an NHS IT idea
and added to the implementation of the
CPMS with a concept of ‘systems of
choice’ for Local Portfolio Management
Systems (LPMS). A framework is now in
place to enable all research networks to
implement an LPMS that meets a national
integration standard, a standard of service
management capability and reaches a
‘kite mark’ of data quality.” The CIO went
on to explain further, ”the LPMS SoC
framework allows each local organisation
to choose the appropriate system for their
research field, whilst still benefiting from
national standards that not only make the
systems inter-operable, but also enable
the user to have a standardised user
experience, therefore cutting down on
business change and training elements.”
Taking key learning from Cranfield on
innovation and managing the benefit
delivery that each innovation can bring
has meant that a programme of facilitated
innovation across the whole organisation
has been possible. The much debated
concept of ‘letting all the flowers bloom’
has been something that the NIHR
CRN has been able to do. “During the
course there was some debate about
different models for enabling innovation
in a controlled way; one ‘take home’
was the Innovation funnel which we
applied, not only to new projects, but
also to projects that were still in delivery
12 months after gestation of the idea.”
This then helped NIHR CRN rationalise
the number of active projects to a figure
that could be both delivered within the
resource envelope, but also would bring
maximum benefit and be within a change
management process that didn’t have a
negative impact upon the business.
The other area of impact that these
organisational changes had was on
Information Security and Governance.
Having oversight of information
governance would now be easier and
implementing frameworks that could be
adopted for information security would
become something that could be audited
more thoroughly. But with change comes
risks which result from new contracts,
new ways of working, new staff and
new monitoring arrangements. The
organisation funds around 10,000 staff
who work on clinical research; ensuring
they have access to training and tools to
protect the organisation and participants
in clinical research is a major task.
“The organisation is a network of
structures and, with this in mind we have
implemented information governance and
security through the availability of:
“The IT Leadership Programme
at Cranfield provided me with
insights into what I needed to
do personally to lead the team
through this change programme
and to manage the different types
of characters it takes to deliver
such a wide agenda.”
The NIHR CRN now uses a phrase
frequently in their presentations - “Imagine
a world”. What they have done, is
imagined a world, where for once there is
a ‘game-changing’ NHS IT success story.
RICHARD CORBRIDGE
Best Practice – Ranging from training
through to templates for key elements
Steering Groups – Resource structures
to provide support to information
governance leads
Frameworks – Audit frameworks to
provide assurance”
Enabling the organisation to learn its own
lessons in a safe environment has been
a goal of the last 12 months, reducing
the risk, but allowing each element of
the structure to evolve its own Standard
Operating Procedures, has been
important to ensure that each part of the
structure has ultimate buy in. Utilising
tools, like those demonstrated by the
Analogies Project, has been particularly
valuable when attempting to explain why
Information Security and Governance are
so important.
“We have spent time explaining why it is
important, without turning our resource
into extras for the Spooks TV series, and
now they understand information security
good practice, it is becoming second
nature to them. As an organisation we
have moved from the Department of
Health’s Audit Tool categorisation of ‘work
to do’ to ‘satisfactory’ in 12 months. This
is down to two things, the buy-in and the
access to expertise from groups like the
Information Security Forum, a group that
provided us with a huge ‘leg up’ in the
creation of our processes and delivery
model.”
The leadership qualities of a CIO are key
in bringing about this level of success,
Richard summarised -
Chief Information Officer &
Senior Information Risk Owner
Informatics Directorate
Clinical Research Network
National Institute for Health Research
www.crncc.nihr.ac.uk
http://richardcorbridge.com
National Institute for
Health Research
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