Generation Innovation aims to inform, upskill and empower the young people of the current generation to thrive as the next leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs of the future. And Anaeko is proud to support this event founded by Catalyst by offering resources for their work experience programme 2022. 

The initiative energises the imaginations and aspirations of young people in Northern Ireland by increasing their knowledge of 21st-century skills and awareness of future careers in innovation. The ethos of the program believes that young people are central to unlocking Northern Ireland’s future as a globally renowned knowledge economy. That’s why we put them at the heart of our inspirational community of entrepreneurs, companies and education leaders.

The work experience programme is for ambitious 17–18-year-olds interested in up-skilling for the jobs of the future. Students receive Design Thinking training over the course of five days, learning how to work as part of a new team made up of students from across Northern Ireland. The new skills are then put to the test by solving a company challenge by developing a solution, before pitching it to the partner company and their fellow students.

The 2022 Programme will engage with 600 students in June for an in-person work experience programme delivered across three locations, working with some of the most successful and dynamic companies in Northern Ireland including Anaeko.

There is a crisis in healthcare in Northern Ireland with longer waiting lists for surgery and crowding in emergency departments. Digital health technology has enormous potential to support service improvements that could save lives and improve outcomes for many patients. Northern Ireland has a substantial reservoir of innovative companies and health professionals.

As a company that works with data in the health tech sector, Anaeko has taken this call to action, and in partnership with Digital Care Systems and supported by HIRANI we have organised an event to deep dive into how we can support the health service in Northern Ireland with their digital care

Pressure on the NHS is increasing, the time to collaborate is now. Leveraging the potential of digital care requires a collaborative and outcomes-based ecosystem. 

This event will comprise of two sessions, one will look at urgent and emergency care, with Dr A Diamond ( Consultant in Emergency Medicine). And a second session looking at elective surgical services with a chair yet TBC.

Why do we need to do this?

1. Local industry has the knowledge and skills to support rapid implementation of solutions for demonstrable patient benefit.
2. Clinical professionals are a vital source of expertise for innovation. Their knowledge of work as done is critical for development of useful and useable solutions.
   
3. Patients are critical in validation of solutions from the earliest stage of development.
4. Discussion between key stakeholders can lead to significant collaboration for patient benefit

Event Outline

• Hosted at the Grand Central Hotel, Belfast on the 25th May from 9.30am to 1700. Two half day sessions. 

• Each session will be opened & chaired by senior clinical leader / problem owner. The chair will outline the challenges in their clinical area / service. 

• There will then be time for a series of short presentations to the panel & other delegates. Interest parties can submit a proposal using the link below. 

• Presenters will have at least 10mins, depending on number of presentations, to outline how their technology / idea could support elective or emergency care. 

• The session will close with a 20-30 min panel discussion & feedback. The panel will consist of patients, health professionals and digital care experts from wide background. A provisional schedule is available at this link. 

Whats next? 

For more information & registration: https://forms.office.com/r/YwdkYVaLrY 

You can also email info@digitalcaresystems.com 

The 6th Annual Impact Awards took place yesterday at London’s Ministry of Sound, and once again highlighted the latest champions of Tech for Good across the UK.

The Digital Leaders Impact Awards celebrate the digital technology innovations that improve people’s lives and the world around us. The awards are open to any person, business, government or non-profit creating or delivering digital products or services for positive social impact. While the selection process is led by industry professionals, the final result in each category is decided by public vote.

Now in their sixth year, the awards were open to any UK-operating business, government department or non-profit using digital products or services for positive social impact. The 39 finalists were chosen out of 500 nominees from across the UK who are leading the way in digital transformation in all sectors.

Anaeko sponsored this years ‘Health Tech’ category, with the award being presented by our CTO Colm Hayden. Anaeko wanted to sponsor this particular category at this years awards as tech in the healthcare sector has never been important and we have been working on some fantastic projects in this space, this year. Anaeko are a Data Analytics and Digital Services Specialist, who deliver intelligent multi-cloud analytics for mature organisations in regulated industries, including the healthcare sector.

And The Winner is 

Healum

AI powered collaborative software for healthcare professionals to deliver personalised care and support for people with long term conditions

Congratulations to all the finalists, to find out more about this years champions or to view information about all the finalists, visit the DL100 website for more details. 

iTouch Smart Tech has forged a supportive innovation partnership with the larger software engineering firm, Anaeko. 

Also based in Belfast, Anaeko is a data partner to multinational brands, helping companies digitally transform and make the most of their data. With 70 staff, mostly engineers, Anaeko’s largest customer is IBM, and they also work with some of the world’s leading innovators, like a gaming unicorn from the US, and one of the world’s largest autonomous vehicle manufacturers.

Historically, Anaeko has become an incubator of fostering innovation with its staff. The supportive partnership model between Anaeko and iTouch could help lead other organisations in their mission to help the world.

The history between Anaeko and iTouch goes back to when iTouch’s founder, Kian Peng Yong, graduated from university. He began working as a software engineer in 2002 employed by Anaeko’s co-founder and CEO, Denis Murphy.

“We knew we’d found a gem in Yong right from his first day,” says Denis.

As Yong become more instrumental to the development team at Anaeko, he found himself spending years (and then decades) devoted to building cloud platforms and data monitoring systems, mostly for large North American companies.

While he was working at Anaeko, Yong began spending some of his free time R&D’ing a solution in energy efficient monitoring, and he experimented with different networking technologies, including LoRaWan. Yong had a desire to develop technologies that could make Net Zero a reality.

Rather than quash or ignore this desire to innovate, Yong’s bosses at Anaeko firmly supported his mission.

Anaeko’s CTO, Colm Hayden, has worked very closely with Yong over the years. Colm said:

“In the last couple of years we have actively decided to develop our methodology for supporting innovation. We purposely set an intention of delivering environmental and societal good through timely access to quality data. This manifests in several different ways, but our support of Yong’s ambition in Net Zero technology is an excellent example of how we have institutionalised this ethos.”

Anaeko’s mission is outwardly focused. By fine-tuning their experience over the years working with large private sector organisations, they now want to spread that learning to today’s Grand Challenges.

The UK Industrial Strategy sets out Grand Challenges to put the UK at the forefront of the industries of the future. The first four Grand Challenges are focused on global trends, identified as:

• Artificial Intelligence and data

• Ageing society

• Clean growth

• Future of mobility [Source: Gov.uk paper on Industrial Strategy]

Colm explained:

“We’re taking the skills we have honed, helping some of the largest private sector organisations in the world to digitalise their processes. We are applying this knowledge to solving the Grand Challenges of our time – starting close to home. We want to look at areas like Net Zero, clean energy, global access to affordable and advanced healthcare, and so on.”

Of the partnership with iTouch, Colm said, “The opportunity to work alongside iTouch in addressing these grand challenges, specifically in achieving decarbonisation and NetZero – that’s of strategic interest to us.”

What other projects is Anaeko supporting?

Colm talked about related areas of innovation. “We’re looking at waiting lists in healthcare and some data projects in health. A core competency is that we bring our customers unified views of reporting – when applied to local government, that sort of transformation can start to make a big difference.”

“These are huge hurdles we’re facing. For example, the aging society – did you know that one in three people born today will live for more than 100 years? How will we support this ageing society? These are large and complex issues.”

In applying its expertise in data skills, Anaeko is proactive in internships, offering placements for university students, active involvement in the local programme for secondary age students, called Generation Innovation, and so on.

As a specific case study, Anaeko had a placement student, Gerard McCann, from Ulster University who was trained in the technology stack, including Java and JavaScript. He was encouraged to apply these skills and learn the iTouch platform components SpringBoot and AWS (Amazon Web Services) as well as Angular. Colm said, “We had trained this student through other projects and then he supported Yong in the transformation of the iTouch network into a more scalable cloud platform – and he completed this during his final year at uni.”

In that student, iTouch benefitted from having a team member who was young, eager, and who needed practical real-world experience. The student was supervised by Anaeko’s senior team, giving all parties the assurance that a high standard of learning was taking place.

Colm explains that Anaeko’s initiative has helped with staff retention over the years – particularly important as software engineers have become so highly sought after. “We foster innovation, and to retain the most innovative engineers you need to support their initiatives. We have a very high proportion of staff who we are being supported in their projects. This stems from giving them flexibility in their working model – to technically leveraging infrastructure and even skills of ours when they needed them – and also business mentoring, such as cost modelling, etc.”

Some final thoughts from Colm on the mentorship of Yong over the years: “We supported his passion and innovation. Now, as he takes iTouch to the next level of maturity, we can support him as a business partner. We both benefit from sharing a common vision and common goals.”

The purpose of the UK public sector and the NHS is to provide services that benefit all citizens and patients, while also managing these services, on a day-to-day basis. Yet many organisations within the public sector and the NHS cannot do this as efficiently as they should because they don’t have a full 360 degree view of their data or “One Source” of the truth. They may not have the skills, tools or permission to access and interpret data that could help them achieve their purpose more effectively.This was one of the main reasons why the Government announced its Shared Services Strategy in 2021. 

The strategy has three key objectives: 

1. To provide a better user experience with systems that are intuitive, easy to use, and mobile-enabled.
   
2. To achieve greater efficiency and value for money through better systems and services, which support productivity and reduce costs.
   
3. To standardise processes and data to support interoperability, making it easier to understand and compare corporate data.

It’s that third objective that interests me the most and demonstrates where Anaeko’s services can help organisations in the public sector to achieve their aims and objectives.

In 2013, the government announced its cloud-first policy, which led to the transition of most front-facing, citizen-focused services to the cloud. However, many back-office systems were left untouched, never upgraded or moved to the cloud. Those organisations are still working with these aged, on-premise systems with limited integration and underpinned by silos of data. 

It’s no surprise, then, that the old technology cannot manage or keep pace with the data and processing power of the cloud-based systems and the needs of the business. 

The Shared Services Strategy will ensure that nearly all departments in the public sector make their own cloud journeys soon, enabling them to share data across departments. With the solutions that Anaeko provides in relation to managing data, government organisations can bring together next generation, cloud business applications with database and data management, analytics, and integration. 

They will also be able to extend the capabilities of these business applications to meet their individual department needs, within one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments all underpinned by “One Source of the Truth.

The solutions that underpin all these challenges rely on a focus on outcomes. Data and systems can feel far removed from achieving purpose, but it is in the intersections of data that we can identify ways to better serve an organisation, it’s employee’s citizens and patients.

Taken at face value, the UK Government’s Shared Services Strategy and NHS reform programmes are a smart solution to address a number of complex and common problems right across the public sector. For years, individual public sector organisations have operated in isolation and in silo’s, specifically in relation to technology, processes and data – using different applications, across diverse technology landscapes, with multiple vendors to perform similar enterprise resource planning (ERP) functions involved in HR, finance, property and procurement. Likewise, some (primarily front-office) functions have transitioned to the cloud while others (usually back-office) are still working with on-premise, antiquated legacy systems, with minimal levels of integration.

This siloed approach has resulted in major inefficiencies, increased complexity and has hampered organisations’ ability to share data with each other. It has also made it difficult, if not impossible to track end-to-end processes across the public sector due to differences in the way data is captured and held. 

These problems have only been exacerbated by the pandemic as home working and isolation measures have created a greater reliance on digital services. This in turn has placed additional stress on civil servants and NHS staff, who are constantly required to learn new skills to engage with and deliver services.

An example of how these issues are being addressed is through the Government’s Shared Services Strategy for Government, announced in March 2021. This strategy has been designed to address some of these problems. It will consolidate digital services across five multi-department shared-services centres, categorised as ‘Defence’, ‘Overseas’, ‘Synergy’, ‘Matrix’ and ‘HMRC’. The Strategy provides a roadmap for more streamlined and harmonised services featuring cloud-based modern systems and access to data.  According to Matthew Coats, the Director General, Government Business Services: “[It] will allow the Civil Service to deliver insights; continuously improve to drive down costs; develop accessible, intuitive, and useful systems for civil servants; and innovate and embrace competition.”

The Government has high aspirations for its digital transformation strategy – and rightfully so. Over the past decade, private enterprises have recognised enormous efficiency, integration and cost-saving benefits from similar cloud-transformation programmes. However, there are some considerations, unique to the public sector, which public sector change leaders must address before embarking on what will ideally be a long-term partnership between the organisations and the technology providers they choose.

Over the coming months, we will be looking more at the changes within the public sector – the challenges and opportunities it will afford to the Government, the civil service and the NHS. Through an ongoing series of blogs, we’ll share guidance on:

• Single v multiple instances 
• Examples of how data common user interface across multiple organisations has unlocked organisational insights and efficiencies. 
• How creating a ‘single source of the truth’ and collective knowledge that empowers civil servants, NHS staff and citizens. 
• What is needed to help the end users embrace digital transformation; and how organisations can reduce complexity while retaining autonomy over digital processes.
• Finally, we’ll explain how Anaeko’s tools and services can help organisations and SI’s solve key functional issues.

The current pace of change in the public sector is an ambitious undertaking but one that is both achievable and beneficial to everyone involved – the Government, the civil service, the NHS, both citizens and patients alike. It has unlocked an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how services are delivered points the way to a more enabled, empowered and ultimately progressive future.