What are you grateful for? At Perficient, we’re thankful for everything our partners do in the field to improve and save lives. This week, we’re taking a moment to reflect on the work of Partners In Health, an organization that provides healthcare services and resources to the most impoverished and underserved regions around the world. PIH is a long-standing partner to Perficient and recently was featured in a Microsoft campaign that highlighted their efforts to bring unified collaboration and cloud technology to their 18,000 colleagues in 10 countries.
We sat down with Dave Mayo, PIH’s Chief Information Officer, to get an update on the organization’s work and fulfillment of their mission to bring the benefits of modern medical science to those most in need. For the next week, we’ll highlight parts of our interview with Mayo to reflect our gratitude for the work they’re doing.
Most recently, PIH and Perficient have been working to build the foundation and infrastructure to deploy technology resources to their operations in various countries around the world, including the launch of Office 365 and Microsoft Azure.
Perficient: How’s the current project going?
Dave Mayo: I can’t say strongly enough how everything that we’ve done from a technology perspective truly is the result of Microsoft and Perficient’s ability to help us architect and deploy features and functionality within the Office 365 stack. We’ve been partners with Perficient for three years now, and our initial discoveries were that we needed to deploy a foundation that we could build on, and that’s really where Office 365 is now.
We were really excited to be selected as part of the cloud campaign and work with the folks from Microsoft in really understanding how we’ve been leveraging Azure and the features and functionalities within the Office 365 suite, like OneDrive and Skype for Business – and at the bare basics, just having one common email platform. It works out that email really is our most used form of communication, and as of late, it’s the really the cornerstone for the organization to be able to communicate with each other. In some situations, we still order supplies via email, so in some aspects it works as our supply chain. It’s literally a life and death tool for us.
At PIH, we’re in a position where we’re trying to leverage anything cloud based. We have challenges that have to do with infrastructure because we do work in the most remote, poorest regions of the world. When you are in the middle of Lesotho or Malawi or Sierra Leone or Liberia in Africa, it’s really hard to have the things that we have domestically here in the US. We take for granted that when you go flip the light switch, the lights turn on all the time. That doesn’t happen where we work, so we have challenges with power. We have challenges with internet connectivity. Although we have strengthened our internet base, our bandwidth is still much slower than you would expect in cities around the world that are heavily populated and not in developing countries.
All around the cloud campaign and going forward, what we’re doing is working to expand the footprint of Office 365 and document management within SharePoint. We want to bring a level of commitment and service to employees of PIH around the world that we can have a central collaborative space to work in, where documents can be shared, stored, and be able to be found. It’s a really exciting time.
We’ve worked with Perficient now for three different engagements, and the most recent one is very exciting. We’re excited about Microsoft PowerBI. We’re really looking forward to leveraging the tools that come with Office 365, because in our first round implementation, we scaled it back to bare bones since we knew we had to deploy it to such a diverse group of people and countries. So, we have a continuous wave of future work and enhancements that we’re really looking forward to working with Perficient on again.
This is part 1 of a week-long series on PIH’s work. Check out more about our work with Partners In Health here.
Reflections on Gratitude: Partners In Health (Part 1 of 5)
by on December 26th, 2016 | ~ minute read
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