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Managing networks in the healthcare industry - Perot Systems

No business has a greater need to keep its networks up and running than one involved in providing health care. Perot Systems, a leading IT-service provider in the medical field, has the responsibility to design, manage and upgrade the information systems of several large healthcare organizations. Says Bill Smith of Perot Systems, "in an outsourcing environment, it is our responsibility to understand our client's exact requirements and put the technologies in place to provide the best possible support for the business function. We take this responsibility very seriously at Perot Systems - and no business takes it more seriously than in health care, where we are truly dealing with life-and-death situations." The tool used by Perot to design, manage and troubleshoot those health-care networks - netViz.

The challenge - getting a handle on immense IT infrastructures

In 1990, Perot took over the data-management functions for a healthcare organization that operated 37 hospitals. Since then, the size of Perot's healthcare-related IT responsibilities has increased exponentially, both from the growth of that original organization and from the addition of a series of other health care providers. The result - a need to get a full understanding of immense IT infrastructures. According to Smith, "understanding what resources are installed where, the ability to model the impact of proposed changes and the capacity to manage software upgrades are critical to our ability to respond rapidly to clients' evolving IT needs, while minimizing downtime and avoiding compatibility issues."

The solution - netViz

In the early years of Perot's healthcare contracts, Smith discovered netViz, and has been using it ever since. "netViz delivered strong drawing functionality and also offered a host of capabilities that simple drawing packages just can't provide," says Smith. "From our first experience with version 1.0, we found the tool easy to use and very flexible. Plus, netViz had a powerful database capability that we had not found in other packages. This capability to integrate graphics and data provided an excellent way to allow us to map and document our clients' networks."

"Full-service" documentation

Perot Systems has taken advantage of a wide range of netViz functionality to fulfill its responsibilities to health-care organizations, says Smith. "The data-enhanced graphics features have allowed netViz to serve multiple user communities at Perot Systems. From the point of entry in Dallas, netViz has spread like a weed; it's being used by engineering, help desk, installation and other teams."

"For example, we take full advantage of the Web-publishing capabilities. The engineering team maps the infrastructure and works with installations to update diagrams as new resources are brought on line. We then publish the diagrams to our intranet sites, making them available for discussions on system upgrade/adaptation to support the help-desk teams and our associates working on site who need to address client requirements in their environment."

"We've also tapped netViz's powerful communication capabilities as a discussion tool when working with the marketing team in pursuit of new business. Sitting face-to-face with a prospect, or participating in a teleconference, we can pull from netViz's menu of icons to diagram our understanding of our customer's problem - and our proposed solution - on the fly. Within minutes, we're working collaboratively with the ability to better understand the challenge and map out potential solutions."

"In addition, we can link our netViz objects to other financial data, currently maintained on countless Excel spreadsheets across our organization. This integration allows us to embed our netViz graphics with costing data. Technical client-service representatives can get a tighter budget estimate associated with infrastructure adaptations and we can make smarter decisions all the way around."

Says Smith, "the bottom line is that we've got an enormous amount of information in different places. netViz helps us consolidate and visualize the data we need to do our job."