Creating a technology roadmap at Music in Hospitals & Care

Music in Hospitals & Care (MiHC) works across the UK to provide the healing power of music in healthcare settings. Their professional musicians play to audiences who may be dealing with serious health conditions, mental health problems, or dementia, and help them with connection, emotional and even physical recovery.

MiHC are undertaking an overhaul their IT systems to facilitate a more dynamic and efficient approach to their work. A key pillar of this strategy will be their CRM system, but MiHC wanted to understand their IT as a whole and contacted Hart Square to undertake an IT Strategy Review.

Need for an objective view

Barbara Osborne, MiHC’s CEO, explained, “there was frustration in the fact that our systems and our processes were, in effect, blocking people from being able to do their job and hindering people doing their roles properly.” One such concern was that the charity had two databases in use, one for England and Wales, the other for Scotland. This meant there were unequal process capabilities depending on the region and no centralised source of truth.

Previous attempts to revamp their systems had met with difficulty. Barbara explained that this was in part due to wariness over the information that was being supplied: “we didn’t really trust what was being told to us. We felt like we were being sold something but we weren’t necessarily getting the objective view or, ‘what does the organisation actually need’…”

The drivers for the project were from a need to understand their IT capabilities in-the-round and receive impartial recommendations over the most logical way to approach the overhaul. “We needed a roadmap which would help us to address how we would look at the fragmented system, the fragmented procurement that we had for IT equipment, and the fragmented approach to data.”

But Barbara also explained that, due to past attempts that had faltered, “we wanted to make sure that the whole organisation was involved and understood why we almost needed to go back to the beginning again.”

Expert guidance

Hart Square was brought in to lead workshops with staff, analyse these findings, provide a roadmap for resolving the concerns, and then present high-level costs for these solutions.

“The workshops were really useful because they were conducted in an objective fashion by Hart Square. There was no sort of bias or preference… everybody felt listened to, everybody felt like they had an input.” Barbara explained that the impartiality was not just of benefit to staff as it helped “the board to understand the investment that was required. That was particularly useful.”

When asked about recommendations for organisations in a similar position, Barbara spoke about the need to know the precise output from a project to assist with forward planning. She also recommended that enough time is set aside to think and prepare properly for a project like this. “It’s not something you can just sort of squeeze in around other stuff. You need to be prepared to invest the time and effort at key stages.”