As part of our Interconnection Between People, Process and Technology book, produced in partnership with Tanium, we spoke to Julie McCombie, Head of IT, Diabetes UK.

Julie joined Diabetes UK as Head of IT over six years ago after decades of working on embracing and applying innovative technologies across a number of sectors. Her focus is to overhaul its technology function and describes her role as primarily “introducing and managing transformational change”. When Julie joined the charity, many of the existing business processes were not optimised for best practice and data management was a key issue. Rather than trying to untangle all the legacy complexities, Julie’s approach was to replace outdated systems entirely and run parallel implementations.

“The systems at Diabetes UK had organically grown over time which is quite common in smaller charities. As these organisations expand, their systems grow with them but the level of maturity in IT processes often doesn’t keep pace. This can lead to inefficiencies particularly in system configuration, security and data management. It’s often more cost effective and efficient to start fresh than to attempt to fix a system that has become too convoluted.”

Before Julie could undertake any of the changes the organisation needed, she first needed to build strong security foundations and enhance IT maturity, and to this end, she transitioned to a Cloud First operating model.

“We initially built a new, secure tenancy from scratch using the latest Microsoft tools ensuring a solid foundation for all future digital transformation projects, followed by a migration of all servers to Azure. This shift resulted in significant operational cost savings which then allowed us to invest in new initiatives.”

Like many organisations, Diabetes UK had data silos and data quality issues that were created when their legacy systems had been modified so extensively they became difficult to maintain. Rather than trying to work around these outdated systems, Diabetes UK decided to move to a new CRM system and introduce a modern data platform, compatible with Fabric, Microsoft’s AI insights platform.

“We’re leveraging machine learning for data transformation, deduplication, merging and validation. One of our more ambitious projects was developing a Power App tool to handle data exceptions within the business. Our goal was to push data responsibility back to our colleagues rather than having it sit with the data team. Machine learning helps us clean and merge data but we need business teams to validate exceptions.”

Julie concedes that the implementation process has been challenging and has taken longer than they expected. But now that the technology is ready for moving into service delivery, Julie outlines an even bigger challenge: implementing people and process change.

“Employees are naturally resistant to change especially when they’ve been using the same systems for over 14 years. They tend to revert to familiar ways of working even with guidance. Breaking these habits requires strong sponsorship from leadership, a comprehensive adoption roadmap and clear organisation- wide communication.”

Automation and AI serve a higher purpose at Diabetes UK than simply delivering cost savings and efficiencies. The charity is passionate about using technology to free people up for higher-level work that furthers their research and advocacy efforts.

“Science is well on the way to identifying markers for Type 1 diabetes in children which means we can predict who is likely to develop the condition later in life. The next step is ensuring this knowledge is embedded throughout the NHS so testing can be widely implemented and clear treatment pathways can be established. By automating routine tasks, our colleagues can focus on embedding these critical advancements that will have a real impact on people’s lives.”