 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, exciting conversation coming up about vaccine cloud management. I've got two guests with me. Tim Elcott is here, the sales and delivery director of IBM services for Salesforce. And Fran Thompson joins us as well, the CIO of the Health Service Executive in Ireland. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Hi there, good to be here. So we're very socially distant, Northern California, UK. Glad to have you guys here. We're gonna talk about what the Health Service Executive or HSE in Ireland has done with IBM and Salesforce to facilitate vaccine management. But Fran, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us a little bit about HSE. So the HSE provides public health and social services to everyone living in Ireland, okay? We, that's acute hospitals, community services nationally. We directly employ about 80,000 people and we fund a further about 40,000 people. And our annual budget is slightly north of 21.6 billion a year. We are the largest employer in the state and the largest organization in the state. And we provide a huge range of services right across the whole spectrum. And we also fund other organizations who provide those services as well. So we would fund some voluntary and charity organizations and we would also buy services from the like to say GP and other organizations as well. So talk to me about a year or so ago when the pandemic hit, what were some of the challenges that HSE faced? And then when it came time to, we have a vaccine, we have multiple vaccines, that rollout capability. What were some of the challenges that you faced initially? So from an organizational perspective, there were huge challenges in that. We were like every other health service worldwide facing an enormous pandemic that was impacting on people. And this is all about people. It's all about people's lives at the end of the day. People can talk about numbers and they can talk about costs and they can talk about other elements. But at the end of the day, this is about individuals, people's lives, their families and their communities. And for the HSE, our challenge was really about how do we manage to protect the totality of the population in Ireland as much as we can from the ravages of the virus. And the initial challenge we had was around contact tracing and managing that before a vaccine became available. And once a vaccine became available, it was then how do we stand up a national vaccine solution that we would be able to deliver and record vaccines to the totality of the population who were getting a vaccine? Yeah, so there was no pre-existing vaccination program of course, probably in most places, you needed to get healthcare workers vaccinated ASAP. And this also needed to be a national program. So what did you do next after determining, all right, we need to work with some partners to be able to build technology to facilitate equitable, efficient rollout of the vaccine. So we did have regional vaccine systems and we do have a number of vaccine programs out there that were managing flu vaccine, Hep C vaccine. But we needed, we didn't have a national program and we needed to vaccinate people immediately. And we also wanted to make sure that vaccine program was not dependent on the HSE infrastructure because we wanted to be able to vaccinate people in non-HSE sites and we wanted non-HSE staff to be able to vaccinate. And we didn't want a huge pre-dependence on our existing infrastructure. So the first thing we did, we looked at a number of enders and we chose IBM as our partner with Salesforce. And that partnership is really a strategic partnership and it's a partnership that we've worked through all the bumps and all the lumps of the program together. And there have been challenges but it's true working with Kim and his team and through our team that we've overcome some of those challenges. And we started off, I remember the very first conversation I had with Tim as I said to him, we need to vaccinate healthcare workers now. Okay, you've got two weeks to start and we need to configure a system, get it up and running and to be able to roll it out to the hospitals and to, and very quickly then to all of our nursing care homes now. And that was the challenge. And let's bring Tim in as this is a radically quick project from MPV to roll out in two weeks. Tim, talk to us about first about the IBM partnership with Salesforce and what you're building together. Absolutely, it's great. And Fran, it's interesting to hear you speaking about the run into this. Because from my perspective, a week before we all started this, we had a simple conversation called into the health service executive has some, they're talking about some vaccination program. How can we help? And then within a week, we've gone from zero to having how many calls with Fran and team just to understand and with the Salesforce team to really understand how the three parties can bring the best of IBM, the best of Salesforce and the best of HSE in terms of the adaptability and what we need to get done to get those vaccinations up and running for the healthcare workers now. You know, when Fran said to me, we need something in two weeks. There was absolutely clarity. If you can't do it in two weeks, there's the door, right? So we knew exactly the challenge and that's the kind of thing right before Christmas that we were so fortunate to really bring in the team. Like everyone, you think about this, everyone as of probably the 14th of December was thinking of winding down, thinking of having their Christmas holidays and the vacation time. And everybody from the Irish team and the English team said, no, we'll cancel Christmas. We'll cancel everything. So it's really Christmas came early and Christmas was canceled all at once. So, and the key bit here, the strategic partnership is IBM and Salesforce have been working together for years and years and years, growing out a partnership. We know their products really well. We've got huge capability in that space. But actually with the new health cloud part of it, the vaccine management parts are quite new to Salesforce as well. Only launched back in sort of August, September time. So it was quite new. So we had to go in together as a sort of a partnership there to say to just get this done. So we had the best people from Salesforce to know the product, the best people from IBM, all turning up on the 14th of December and saying, right, we've got to get this done by the 29th with Christmas holidays in the way and the vacation time in the way. I think we had 36 hours of time off to eat turkey and fill ourselves before getting back to the wheel and really getting this done. And to get, I think it was four acute hospitals we went into as of the 29th to start the vaccination program. So trying to do that, understanding everything is a compromise at that point. But it has to be secure. This is personal data going into these systems. So you can't forget about all the aspects. It's got this minimum, but minimum with those kind of constraints as a health system. So it needs to be secure. It needs to also be that national platform going forward as well. So basing on a great platform like Salesforce, you know you can scale out. You know you've got those options to grow in the future but yeah, not without a lot of challenge and then working out what's now, getting to know each other. Like that we only talked about twice before that we have to know each other pretty well now. But just trying to work out how we then structure what's it going to happen every two weeks afterwards? How's that going to move forward? We're going live every two weeks and we haven't done that now for the last three months. So good fun. So yeah, good fun. But so much work to get done and a huge coordinated effort in a very short time period during a very challenging time. Talk to me a little bit about Fran, but you launched this cloud management, vaccine cloud management in January, 2021. And to date, I think you told me one million people have been vaccinated so far. Talk to me about what the IBM Salesforce solution enables you to deliver to the HSC and to the Irish citizens. So we have delivered a million vaccines, okay, to two stages. There's a dose one and a dose two for most people in Ireland. And there's about 720,000 people who got their dose one and the balance I've got the dose two. That's about one in five of the population that has to be vaccinated. And one of the things we're very conscious of is that an organization like that, we need to take a risk-based approach to this. So we need to look at the most vulnerable groups. There were lots of people who were dying from this and a lot of people were elderly groups and people who were vulnerable with pre-medical conditions. So our challenge was how do we vaccinate those people quickly and effectively and also vaccinate healthcare workers who are going to care for these people? And that's where we prioritized the work. So we had to go into 50 acute sites, about 600 or so care homes. We set up a lot of what we call pop-up clinics, literally a tent in a location or we took over a sports hall or whatever we did. We rolled it out to the GP to about 2,500 GP sites. And all of that was being done while we were building the system. So we were building the system and designing the system on two-week sprints. We had to be agile, we had to be quick. We can make huge compromises when we know that. I mean, everyone wants a perfect system which is to make the compromise and look and say what do you need to do now to keep the program running and how you manage that? We had about 3,000 users all to be set up fairly quickly or a little over 2,500 users. So you have to manage all that as you're going through everything. I think agile is the name of the game here. Tim, talk to us about how you're delivering the agility in such a tenuous time. Well, we're all virtual, which is added to the mix, but the funny thing with that agility, we've got a span of people across all the countries and everywhere that we can bring to that party. And we're running a normal, what I would call a normal agile project, except normally it would take two, three months to really get that team working effectively, getting to know each other and we just not had time to do that. So there's been a core team here and we're bringing in the experts around it, but really just everything is working with Fran, with very hand in glove, trying just to work out what we need to do here to look at the next sprint, to look at the next go live, to look at the compromise. How do we compromise for two weeks? What can we live with for two weeks? What's in the backlog for now? And Fran and I have many conversations. What do we need to do this week? And then what's next week? And that's the level of fluidity and that's in part because of the way the pandemics and the response to pandemic is mapping out. As we sort of vaccines are changing, availability is changing, the rollout plan is changing, none of us have worked through a pandemic before. So agility is the name of the game at the highest level. I think we're all now very used to being, sorry, there's a problem, something's changed, can we adapt the system too? You know, we're normally in a sprint, I'd be thinking I've got some fixed requirements for two weeks, I'll build that and then do the next two weeks. Everything is up for grabs and we're just having to maintain quality at the pace, the responsiveness and balancing it all as an IBM team. And you think, and whilst we're also doing that on a platform that it takes time to configure and build these things as well. So it's, some of it is, you're going to have to wait a few days. So sorry, you know, and a few days is really probably sometimes the maximum amount of time that can be, you can defer. But as Fran and everyone in the HSE in the National Immunisation Office, everyone's pragmatic about realising we're all in this together and it's really just being one single team, one unit working out and very open and transparent about the art of the possible. And we're doing something, go ahead Fran. We had a phrase there with, like there was a piece that we just have to just do it now. And we did a lot of that, okay? You know, where there were things that were prioritised, we were in the middle of a sprint. There were changes in the programme or there were changes in how the vaccination was going to be delivered. And we couldn't wait the week. Just it wasn't available. So we have this thing of just got to do it now and him and the team, you know, drop what they were doing, you know, made the changes. We tested them fast and we put them in and that gave us then, you know, an extra time to actually then deliver the rest of the sprint. And we had to do that several, okay, several very, very late nights to deliver. And I imagine that's still going on, but to wrap here guys, and amazing work that you've done together so far with the Salesforce Vaccine Cloud Management, rolling out across the HSC, you said one million vaccinations delivered, many hundreds of thousands in the queue, I'm sure more iterative work and sleepless nights, but what you're doing for the country of Ireland is literally us friends of them being lifesaving. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today on the programme. You're welcome, thank you. You're very welcome, thank you. Hi, Tim and Fran, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021.