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IMAT3424: Facilities and Standards of Dementia - Banner Case Study Assessment Answer
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Banner Case Study Assessment Answer
Case Study: Banner, one of England’s largest not-for-profit providers of housing and care for people over 55, have an ambitious growth strategy supporting their clear vision for the future. The group believes their programme of innovative new developments demonstrates their commitment to meeting the changing aspirations of older people. Established for over 40 years, Banner has been innovating and raising standards ever since. Their homes have won awards for facilities and standards of dementia care for example. Their provision includes a wide range of housing alternatives including care homes and independent apartments. Expert care is available at all Banner homes, whether general day-to-day support, nursing services, or specialist dementia care; the group employs over 5,000 qualified care staff. The group’s IS/IT department is based in London, currently consisting of a small team of 12 development and support staff, supporting over 100 care homes and retirement properties. Head office support departments such as human resources, finance, procurement and property management are located in three sites across the country, and include two internal supply depots. Application portfolio includes some isolated legacy systems from the earliest days of the group’s existence, as well as many more modern systems built to support the extensive web presence. IT is used to underpin all of Banner’s operations, including stock control for general supplies and nursing-specific supplies as well as medications; resident records including medication and care records; staff management including recruitment, training and development records; property management; financial planning and management; sales and marketing. Some of these IT functions are delivered through the Banner intranet but most are deployed on third-party servers accessible through the internet. As part of the latest development plans, Banner CEO Isabel Steier wants to sharpen up their operations using a new archiving system. She is aware that some of their existing portfolio was well-suited to earlier days when the group was smaller, and that whilst there have been no major problems, some support systems are showing the strain for example ensuring that the right supplies are delivered to the right homes every time, and that staff training records are up to date at all times. With several new property developments in progress, Isabel is conscious that demand on the IT systems will grow quickly and she wants to ensure their systems will cope well. After sharing these concerns with the IT director Laura Oliver she created a study team to investigate options for improving the robustness of both systems and user procedures, and their recommendations are to be taken forward as swiftly as possible. The team came back to Laura with an idea to develop an integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. This system will cover various operations of Banner ranging from managing their supplies to providing timely service to their customers. Technical recommendations include a move away from large groups of small file servers toward fewer, larger servers linked more effectively. This entails redeveloping parts of the existing network infrastructure, as well as deploying new servers based on unfamiliar technology. There is also a recommendation to expand the capacity of both operational and historical data storage and to link these to support departments enabling support managers to generate their own reporting tools. A further recommendation is to deploy many more of the support functions through the intranet rather than on local computers or third-party servers. Alongside these changes, many small improvements are to be made to the core systems to ensure they meet current user requirements including compliance with Care Quality Commission regulations. For example, these regulations provide staff with two hours to respond to customers’ urgent requests and 24 hours for other requests. The study team recommended including some of the support users, and representatives from the care functions, in the development teams. A suitable development methodology will need to be implemented to carry out this recommendation. Board of directors would like to see the system development plans implemented fairly quickly, to give time for proving before the current major properties under development have been commissioned into use; this gives a timescale of approximately 10 months for development and 3 months for proving. The executive board approved a total budget of £300,000 for this project and an initial time plan of 13 months. They however asked for a cost / benefit analysis of the project. After the meeting, Isabel also asks Laura to form an expert team for the project as soon as she can. Laura thinks this team should cover a variety of skills including (but not limited to) business analysis, software, hardware, and network. She also immediately thinks of people inside Banner IT department who may join this team and understands that they may require to hire a number of new staff for this project.This Case Study Assignment has been solved by our Case Study experts at My Uni Paper. Our Assignment Writing Experts are efficient to provide a fresh solution to this question. We are serving more than 10000+ Students in Australia, UK & US by helping them to score HD in their academics. Our Experts are well trained to follow all marking rubrics & referencing style.