Lifeblood of the organization
Lifeblood of the organization
The Red Cross is renowned for its remarkable humanitarian achievements throughout the world, such as its recent efforts throughout Asia in response to the Tsunami crisis. It is less known for how it uses technology to reduce the difficulties of its challenging goals for the purpose of saving lives. Rodney Appleyard reports on one such technology solution it is currently using to enable it to locate more blood donors
The Australian Red Cross Blood Service (ARCBS) has always been well-respected and trusted because it does such a good job of collecting blood from so many donors. But it realised recently that it could provide an even better service and attract even more donors through utilising data mining technology.
The upshot of this was the selection of Management Information Principles (MIP) to implement a data integration platform provided by Informatica, called PowerCenter. MIP, founded in 1992, is a data management consultancy that offers services such as data profiling, data integration and data warehousing.
MIP united data based in disparate local systems so that information about donors from all over Australia could be accessed from a central system. It centralised the information into one database that connected to a business intelligence solution which now provides a consolidated view of the ARCBS' nationwide operations for strategic analysis.
Magdalena Wheatland, the national quality and systems manager at the ARCBS, says that the Informatica package has been invaluable to the charity. "Australia is one of the safest, more effective blood-collection services in the world.
"The consolidated organisational information enabled by Informatica is helping us to maintain that distinction in the face of growing demand. Not only do we have better and more timely information about where blood is located, we're able to more effectively follow its movement and storage to reduce waste."
The advantages of this analysis is that it provides the ARCBS with the intelligence needed to understand why certain regions receive more donors than others and it also provides guidance on how low donor areas could be improved.
The business intelligence system enables this information to be presented in an easy to understand manner, so that ARCBS can replicate the conditions of one successful area in another region.
In addition, the ARCBS handles over one million blood donations each year, which have to meet the strict requirements of the Australian government's new National Blood Authority.
The Informatica solution started off integrating information from multiple state and territory based applications during the first few months of 2004, but since then, it has been integrating data from all over the country to create a nationwide view of supply and demand, and donor behaviour.
Steve Hitchman, the managing director of MIP, says his staff had to be extremely thorough in order to provide the most accurate information for the ARCBS. He reckons that too many companies think that applying the business intelligence software alone is enough to provide a comprehensive analysis of the data that can produce interesting ideas for future strategies, but they do not realise that important validation work has to be put in before the software can be helpful.
"If you look at all of the organisations in Australia, the ones with over 75 percent data accuracy are among the leaders. When companies implement new CRM systems, for example, the reason why they go off the rails and lose millions and millions of dollars is because something has gone wrong with the data migration exercise.
"They have no idea of the things that are wrong in their system. They look at the documentation and try to work out how they are going to integrate it. Well guess what, every single piece of documentation in Australia is wrong. It is divisions away from the truth."
He says that important code changes within organisations are never recorded in the documentation, because the workers do not update the records. So the migration does not work for companies because they have treated their documents with such disdain.
"It's just started to be recognised in the market now that data is really important and the quality of data is really crap. Only 17 percent of data migrating exercises finish on time and within budget in Australia. 49 percent over-run and 34 percent actually fail completely because they run out of money. This is because everybody underestimates the integrity and quality of their data.
"Most companies that offer business intelligence solutions only offer contingency plans, in case something goes wrong, which of course saves them money. But the consequences are too big with compliance."
In terms of The Red Cross, Hitchman made sure that these principles were applied thoroughly to this case too. In the end, the ARCBS now has knowledge from around the country on every donor and where their blood was taken from.
Hitchman says that there have been huge improvements with auditing processes too, because ARCBS' old historical auditing systems were too complicated to manage and it was difficult to match up the records between the systems. The new system has also done away with duplication.
Wheatland believes that Informatica and MIP have provided ARCBS with highly auditable and reliable data integration and transformation processes, which they believe will help to ensure that legislative reporting to the National Blood Authority is 100 percent accurate.
"We've gained the ability to analyse donation trends by geography and behaviour, which will help drive better staffing decisions and more effective marketing campaigns as the need for blood and blood products continues to rise."
Hitchman is very proud to be involved with this project, because of its potential to save more lives by allowing ARCBS to find more donors.
The data will also be helpful for comprehensive analysis of blood-testing results to aid new testing procedures aimed at protecting individuals from emerging diseases.Paul Albright, the executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Informatica, says: "Healthcare and other public service entities like ARCBS are under extreme pressure from all sides to optimise performance, closely manage costs and comply with mounting legislative demands.
"We're pleased to be helping ARCBS unite its legacy data to fully support its charter of uniting local blood-collection groups into a national service."
The Australian Red Cross has been responsible for the collection, processing and distribution of blood and blood products to the Australian community since 1929.
Thanks to the application of this modern technology, it can now build on its reputation and history of saving lives by using the intelligence provided to find many more donors.The exciting thing is that when organisations such as The Red Cross, start using business intelligence technology that has traditionally been used by enterprises to improve their operations, the lives of many people-as well as the bottom line-will be improved.
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