Case Study: Ombudsman (Wales)

Customer

The Public Services Ombudsman for Wales(PSOW) is an organisation handling complaints about Welsh local authorities, health services, public bodies and social landlords. The Ombudsman replaced three existing Ombudsman services and provides a ‘one stop shop’ for the people of Wales who wish to raise complaints about Public Sector organisations.

Business Issues

With the need to unite, what were 3 separate offices, and move to a single new office outside Cardiff city, a new IT infrastructure was required. Even more challenging was the fact that the organisation had no internal IT department to plan, project manage and support the IT required by the organisation.

CAS solution

Staff at CAS worked closely with the PSOW to understand their business goals, refine their IT requirements, specify their hardware requirements, install all hardware and operating system software, install and tailor the Complaints Handling software, migrate existing data and train all PSOW staff. Key to the success of the project was tight control through the use of the PRINCE2 project management methodology. The system is now supported remotely from CAS offices in Edinburgh.

Benefits

The staff at PSOW, all of which were used to different case management systems, have become familiar with the new system and now find the CAS application easy to understand and operate. This in turn has encouraged the use of the technology to support the Ombudsman’s business goals. The system has strong MIS facilities to show both quantitative and qualitative performance, workflow to allow consistency of processes followed, and strong knowledge management features to support the Ombudsman’s role in suggesting improvements to best-practice. The system has been tailored to the particular needs of the PSOW while its flexible design ensures its adaptability in the future to meet the changing business environment of the PSOW.

Andrew Walsh, Corporate Services Director, PSOW adds "The team at CAS have been thoroughly professional in delivering the project. With their support we now have an easy-to-use IT environment to support the roles of staff at all levels within the organisation- a system which will help us achieve our business goals. Despite very demanding implementation times, CAS were able to ensure that we had a functioning IT system when the new office opened. CAS has provided excellent post implementation care showing a commitment to problem solving and system development to ensure that the system fully meets our needs".

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