Advocate Health Care

The Challenge

As the largest health system in Illinois with nearly 32,000 employees, Advocate Health Care makes every effort to enable its people to connect around the same goal—create the best place for patients to heal, doctors to practice and associates to work. While staying connected across hundreds of miles is challenging for any organization, the need for collaboration across Advocate’s system is essential.

After 10 years of using an iPlanet messaging system, the company needed to evaluate on-premise versus cloud solutions, and find a supported platform that would scale to meet its needs well into the future. In considering alternatives, reducing costs was important, but aligning with its unified communications roadmap was essential. More effective communication within and across hospitals was also critical, such as being able to connect to the right people instantly.

Our Approach

Slalom Consulting’s cost, TCO, and technical analysis showed that Microsoft's BPOS Cloud-based solution made the most economic sense for Advocate, while also offering the most flexible and resilient unified communications platform.

Slalom migrated users from iPlanet, Lotus Notes, and certain legacy Exchange versions to Exchange Online, and supported user readiness activities, including communications, training, and support. Next, it designed an Exchange Online solution to fully leverage the platform without the need or cost of additional third-party migration tools. Slalom then advanced Advocate’s unified communication strategy by:

• Assessing current collaboration needs and developing a SharePoint roadmap
• Creating a governance framework by which SharePoint would be deployed and used consistently across the system
• Developing a custom rollout approach by hospital to ensure appropriate support and adoption of instant messaging and live meeting capabilities

The Results

Advocate can now provide its staff with more advanced collaboration and communications capabilities through a new, industry-standard messaging platform. They can see each other’s presence information in order to reach out more efficiently for critical business needs, increasing productivity by combining availability with instant messaging capabilities. They can also collaborate in real-time with internal and external colleagues using newly deployed tools such as Cisco point-to-point video TelePresence and Microsoft Office’s Live Meeting, reducing travel costs and saving time.

• Advocate is one of the largest Exchange Online (shared) clients for Microsoft
• Advocate has fully committed to the Exchange Online solution and Slalom as its partner for all migration-related activities
• The solution saves more than $1 million per year in reduced costs for labor, hardware, and software
• The newly developed SharePoint roadmap will continue to expand collaboration efforts by adding SharePoint capabilities in easily adopted pieces

By migrating Advocate to Microsoft BPOS, Slalom has enabled the organization to fully realize its unified communication strategy, and build a solid, long-term foundation for future growth.