IT Portfolio Management Assignment

Instructions

IT portfolio includes managing systematic management to all investments, activities as well as projects that are implemented in the information technology department of an organization (Burgelman, Snihur & Thomas, 2019). As with increasing demand of the healthcare service, IT projects in the healthcare centers have also increased and that has increased value based purchasing in the healthcare centers. Healthcare centers implements IT portfolio management for maximizing the expenditures and have long term benefits.

This report states implementing Cloud computing IT project in the XYZ healthcare center to store the expanded data and needs to increase the ability to store more number of patients records. The concept of cloud computing is a logical approach and the concept of cloud computing is elastic enabling the healthcare center to implement more number of patient’s record. The data of the cloud that the healthcare center will implement can be used from any location which is internet enabled. The XYZ organization wants to implement a secured cloud in its business process and integrated resources of cloud in network of the business. This report details the IT portfolio that XYZ organization wants to implement for managing the IT business operations and secure the network of the organization.

Business area of organization

The cloud computing technology that is to be implemented in the healthcare center helps the organization to embrace new technologies across the organization (Gerpott & May, 2016).

Clinical benefits: The biggest advantage of clinics that cloud computing provides is accessing the applications which were not unattainable or inaccessible previously. In the healthcare centers, implementing digital pathology with cloud service management has huge benefit to the organization. The healthcare center can carry out a service that would cost millions previously only by implementing cloud computing (Chen & Jiang, 2020). Accessing pathologists provides an excellence remote facility, which is a new service to all local patients and they can depend on the remote experts for rendering the diagnoses process.

The experts can also access the data of the patients remotely and when the patients needed the service via Internet with the connected devices. Professional experts can view the results of diagnostics from their home and can determine discharging of the patients decreasing the waiting time of the patients. Cloud computing creates a collaboration between the physicians and the health professionals and makes the collaboration reality. The information of the patients is located centrally and the data can be accessible to all the authorized users. The information of patients are now shared between the caregivers, irrespective of their locations and this helps in better decision making in the system.

Demonstration of Technology Portfolio Understanding

Business benefits: There are many business benefits that technology of cloud computing provides to the XYZ healthcare. The technologies of cloud computing provides tremendous benefits which contributes the welfare of the organization (Wang & Hajli, 2017). The main business of the healthcare centers is to provide treatment to the patients and provide proper care to the patients. The healthcare centers are not IT focused but the healthcare centers includes IT portfolio in the business operations to enhance their business and services. With the cloud technologies, there is tremendous benefit that contributes the welfare of the organization. The healthcare providers provides medical technologist including technical affinity without any formal background in technical ground. The cloud mainly provides the access ability with specific experts for managing as well as maintaining the systems. Cloud provider provides block storage expert, includes expert for network security and archive and back up expert who can manage different components in the system. The providers needs to build up different set of skills that is they can focus on the clinical applications who can maximize the using of the applications. The experts can spend their time and provide effort for implementing best practices in each component and provides benefit to the clinical users along with the patients.

The cloud model in the health care centers also provides pricing that is transaction based. With the technologies of cloud computing, the utilization rate in project is 100%and cloud provider is mainly responsible to maintain different hardware in the system. the cloud computing technologies has shifted the paradigm of services in the healthcare centers and provided the users with consistent delivery of service.

Five different technologies the Cloud computing provides to the XYZ healthcare after its implementation are:

1. Virtualization: Virtualization includes a process that shares license for its physical instances of all the applications that are used among different users in the healthcare centers. The purpose of virtualization provided by cloud computing is to provide the users hardware virtualization, server virtualization, storage virtualization and operating system virtualization. The main aim is to provide the clients a standard version of cloud application to all the clients and this is use for flexibility as well as running all processes instantly.
2. Service related architecture: SOA is a particular application that divides the service provided by the healthcare system in two sectors, individual business and procedure daily (Busch, 2017). This particular component in cloud application enables the arrangements that are related to cloud which can modify or adjusted as per the need of the business. The systems which are service oriented helps to diffuse two main components, one is quality and the other is software as service. The software service helps to provide new delivery method which can be inherited from the applications of the service providers.
3. Grid Computing: This includes a process that connects different servers and helps them to achieve a common goal in the organization. This technology of cloud computing turns larger problems to smaller ones and helps to broadcast them to the servers and place those within grid. Grid computing is applied in healthcare service because it intends to share all resources on huge scale of cluster computing. This technology utilizes power of all the unused computer system and provides solution for a complex scientific problem.
4. Utility Computing: This technology depends on a model that is based on pay per utilize. This technology provides computational service if demanded in metered benefit. Utility computing helps to reduce the cost by reducing the initial investment in the organization without any extra cost. If client uses less space, the cost will also be reduced accordingly.
5. Infrastructure as a Service: The technology of cloud computing mainly offers virtual as well as physical computers and the actual machines are mainly accessed by the hypervisors that are included in the pool as well as managed by the operational networks. Cloud computing mainly includes operating framework on the actual machines as well as on the application programming. The technology of IaaS provides resources like IP addressing, storages, firewalls, IP addresses, virtual machines and many more are made available to the clients on the basis of time cost.

Health care systems have grown over the time and the level of services that are provided by the healthcare have increased to a much high level. This growing of healthcare service has increased the duplication level and in general decreasing the disjointed services. As per Porter’s value change, the value change of the health care industry also includes manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, healthcare professionals, providers, and payers (John Vitalis, Pete Shelkin & PMP, 2018). As per Porter, the value chain is described as internal processes that is performed by an organization such as designing, marketing, delivering as well as supporting the product. The value chain of Porter is also known as supply chain which is physical representation of the different processes that are involved in giving the service.

Developing a Value Chain using Porter’s Value Chain Approach

Healthcare services have been changing but the main focus of the supply chain has not been included. When value chain is not added in the service, safety of the patient are at risk and the supply chain is to be transformed.  The actors who are included in Porter’s value chain are payers, fiscal intermediaries, providers, purchaser and producers.

Payers in the XYZ healthcare is the Government, the employer and the individuals. Fiscal intermediaries mainly includes Insurers, third party administrations, health maintenance. The providers in healthcare includes healthcare providers such as hospitals, physicians or the pharmacies who are associated to provide service. The purchasers are the wholesalers, group purchasing and suppliers and the producers are device manufacturers, equipment and the drug manufacturers.

There is complexity in the value chain when the governmental and the policies of government is added in secondary industries which includes private provider or the insurance companies. The complexities, value chain which is interdependent mainly cause synchronicity between all the links. This makes difficult to see the value that is being delivered and the actual cost of the service. As per Porter’s value chain, the healthcare organizations are to provide best quality care to all patients at minimum cost level. As per Porter’s Strategy, the organization can provide low cost best service by the following ways:

1. Organizing proper care service to the patients instated of caring about tools.
2. The outcomes from the healthcare centers are to be measured and cost of the patients are to be measured.
3. The organization should pay for care in different way and reimburse the providers by bundled prices for all the care cycles.
4. Integrating the care delivery having separate facilities.
5. Breaking down the local nature of the care delivery.
6. Building information technology platform for synchronizing the work.

Business strategies

Two business strategies that can be used in XYZ healthcare organization are:

1. Cost reduction strategy: To save the cost on healthcare, the strategy should focus on reducing all primary drivers of the poor health. The cost reduction strategy in healthcare should increase the resources of the patient’s wellness, prevention of the patients, and nutrition of patients (Pfannstiel & Rasche, 2017). The organization should increase the wellness resources of the organization instead of focusing on the tools to improve other business strategies. The organization can advise their patients on database related to weight management and about their diet therapies. The organization can improve their service using the cloud data and send the weight management service and the diet therapies. The healthcare can also include fitness cessation programs which might be cost reduction in long term healthcare.
2. Patient Satisfaction strategy: Patient satisfaction is the prime business strategy that the XYZ healthcare needs to implement. The front desk of the organization needs to be improved so that patients taking service form the organization gets better services. The organization needs to take follow up for the appointments that the patients have to provide better experience to patients in hospitals. The organization should build up positive relationships and should encourage referrals for mouth. For completing this business strategy, cloud computing can be used for storing the details of the patients securely. The organization should know about the need of their patients from the data stored on their server and should offer them service accordingly.

Two frameworks for the organization

Resource based view

Resource based theory states that the organizations or firms includes resources, which is a subset that enables the firm to achieve the competitive advantage and subset which leads to improve the performance of the organization in long term (Gaardboe, Nyvang & Sandalgaard, 2017). Resources are much valuable for the organization and rare resources can result in creating competitive advantage. The competitive advantage can sustain over long period of time because the organizations can protect the resource limitation, transfer the resources and substitute the resources. Resource based theory provides the organization an opportunity to develop the competitive advantages over the rivals. Competitive advantage can help the organization to have larger profit. Strategic resource is known as asset for the organization and it is difficult to imitate and is non-substitutable. Resources in an organization are valuable to an extent that the resource helps in creating a firm strategy which capitalize all opportunities as well as ward off the threats. Competitors face hard time to duplicate the resources that are difficult to imitate. A resource of an organization can be non-substitutable because the competitor cannot find alternative way to have profits from that resource. The resource based theory in the organization will helps to recognize all the strategic resources that are created by including different strategies and different resources.

Developing New IT/Business Strategies

Porter’s Five forces

Porter’s five forces is a powerful tool that helps the organization to understand the competiveness of the business environment (Zheng, Zheng & Li, 2019). The five forces rule of porter helps to identify the potential profitability of the organization. Understanding Porter’s five forces will enable to understand the environment and the organization will make profit out of it. Using the five forces, the organization will be able to adjust the strategy accordingly. The five forces included in Porter’s five forces includes:

Competitive Rivalry: This states the total number and the strength of the competitors in the market. The rivalry between the competitors is intense and different companies attracts different customers stating price cuts and have high impact on the marketing campaigns of the companies. Having intense competition can result in buyers and suppliers to go to other companies.

Supplier Power: This force describes how easily the suppliers can increase their prices. This denotes the potential suppliers of the company. With more number of suppliers, it becomes much easier to switch between the suppliers.

Buyer Power: When the organization deals with savvy customers, then the power of buyer is more and the power of the organization decreases. The buying power of the buyer is to be known.

Threat of substitution: The customers of the company might find another alternative service provider which can provide them better service. Substitution can weaken the position and can threaten the profitability.

Threat of new entry: Threat of new entry states that the organization might be affected by new entry in the market. It is recommended to apply new strategies in the business to avoid competition in the market.

6 W approach is a marketing approach that asks six questions for gathering information. Six questions that are discussed in 6 W approach are why, where, when, how, what and who. Who denotes the target audience of the company, what denotes what keywords are searched to have improvements, when states the time where keywords are highly searched for, why denotes the reason for selecting the keywords, where states the place the keywords are to be mapped for increasing the sales and how state the way the deliverable will help the overall strategy in the marketing process. XYZ organization needs to implement 6W approach to have proper marketing skills strategy. XYZ needs to increase their service and for providing better service, 6 W approach is to be implemented in marketing process of organization.

Applicable Theories or Frameworks

The 6W will help to provide a comfortable transparency level to all the clients associated with the company. This approach provides accountability for the company recommendations. 6W provides justification of way this approach is important for marketing mix and show the clients the value they have in their business.

Measuring outcomes are needed for a company to know the effectiveness of the intervention, identifying the effective practices in the company, identify the practices which needs improvement, for providing value to the existing as well as the potential funders and get the clarity in the purpose of the program (Groves et al., 2016). There are some key phases for measuring the outcome of an organization. The different phases included in the outcome measuring includes

1. Identifying the outcomes as well as developing the performance measures: This phase includes two objectives, establishing shared understanding and creating different set of measures that states the logic model.
2. Creating as well as implementing different plan for data collection: This phase states about the way to plan as well as implement the data collection.
3. Analyzing the data: The data that were collected in previous phases are to be analyzed.
4. Communication all the results: The results achieved from the analyzing of data are to be communicated between all the team members.
5. Reflecting, learning as well as continuing the process again: All lessons learnt are to be reflected and the processes are to be carried out again.

1. Cost Reducing strategy: The risk included in cost reduction strategies are management of operational costs and reducing the cost by minimizing all ineffective performance in the organization. There is also a risk in mitigation of the external financing that are included in asset management. There might also a risk in managing the capital cost of the organization because of asset turnover analysis.

The risk can be managed by included elements of risk management such as setting a goal, event identification, evaluation of risks, reacting properly for the identified risk, controlling the risks as well as monitoring the risks. The benefits that are included comprises both business areas and clinical areas. In this time of cost cutting, there are many facilities that states that cloud computing provides many clinical benefits which can justify the expenditures and cloud technologies which are the potential tools for having benefit in organization. With the cloud computing service, the patient’s care can be improved by providing advanced service with cloud computing services and the users can be provided with more efficient service. With the cloud computing, the patients do not need to travel and can get remote access of service. Waiting lists of the patients can be managed easily because more patients needs to have same tests in more than one location having large experts availability.

1. Patient satisfaction strategy: Patient satisfaction means extending the happiness of the patients by providing them extended service. Patient’s satisfaction is the most valuable asset for the healthcare center. Risk that might include in providing customer satisfaction is there might be other competitors in the market who might provide better service to the customers. Other organizations might have improved resources and equipment for providing better customer service. The strategies that can be implemented to improve the satisfaction of the patients are:
2. Providing them online tools so that they can manage their own care.
3. Tie all the processes together so that processes can be personalized and process are seamless for patients.
4. Making navigation easy for the patients to find out more information.

Applying information, technologies and data for solving the issues across the business models.

1. Environment Uncertainty: Due to COVID 19 case, the business might find environmental uncertainties in completing the business strategies. Environmental uncertainties occurs when the environmental conditions are changing constantly (Bai, Meredith & Burstein, 2018). As a result of environmental change, the management of the organization might not be able to manage its business operations. There might be lock down in the city or customer might not be able to come to the healthcare centers for their treatment. The environmental uncertainty impacts the company and new technology are to be included to solve the uncertainty in the business operations

In such situation, the healthcare organization should arrange for virtual treatment implementing augmented reality in its business process. Applications of augmented reality would help to improve the treatment process and the patients can have their treatment process sitting in their homes. This would help the business to have new business strategy and can compete with the other competitors in the market.

1. State Uncertainty:  State uncertainty refers to inability of predicting the changes in the organization. These changes includes suppliers, competitors, consumer, and government officials of the area. The organization might be impacted heavily with the regulatory changes imposed by the government. There might be huge tax enforcement by the government dues to pandemic in the region and dues to financial loss of government in the area.

The state uncertainties can be mitigated by staying updated with all the rules and regulations that are associated with the government. The uncertainty mitigation strategy includes accessing the changes which might affect the organization and gain knowledge about the way to succeed with the changes associated with company. This will help to mitigate the risks. The knowledge gained after researching is to be figured out and the assumptions that are made to mitigate the uncertainty is to be challenged to come over the uncertainty. The organization should focus on the flexibility, resilience as well as the agility of the strategic planning done to mitigate the uncertainty in the organization.

Measuring and Coherence of Strategies

Conclusion

The IT portfolio in healthcare centers helps to leaders a strategic approach to allocate the resources which correlates with the projects of the healthcare centers. IT portfolio helps the organization to address effectively all the unexpected IT demands and the expenses in the organization. This report deals with implementing cloud computing in the working process of the XYZ healthcare center so that they can have better operations and can provide more customer satisfaction with their service. The cloud computing that is to be implemented in the organization will benefit both the clinical activities and the business activities in the organization. This will help to improve customer satisfaction and will provide customized services to the customers. This report also explains the importance of value chain and supply chain in the organization suing the Porter’s Value chain approach and has explained a brief details about the activities of value chain.

The report above have discussed the IT strategies that are to be implemented in the business to improve their service. Two business strategies are mentioned in report one is customer satisfaction strategy and cost reducing strategy. Two theories have been detailed in the report stating Porter’s five forces and the resource based view. This report also explains 6W in the organization and states different measuring outcome that are needed for the organization. This report also explains the identification of risks and the threat and opportunity that uncertainties have on the business operations.

References

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Groves, P., Kayyali, B., Knott, D., & Kuiken, S. V. (2016). The’big data’revolution in healthcare: Accelerating value and innovation.

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