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Research on software and service engineering conducted at the University of East London has been successfully applied to the international telecom sector, within which it has contributed to the creation by Telecom Italia of a context-aware service platform and of mobile Value-Added Services based on that platform. The application of our work has had a positive impact on Telecom Italia's software development process, enabling an easier and faster integration of heterogeneous services necessary to provide mobile Value Added Services. The principal benefits have been to Telecom Italia's customers through the provision to them of improved telecom services, and to the company itself, which has been able to increase its customer base and profitability.
Research in ERPE (1994-date) to measure customer reaction and attitude to communication interfaces in consumer services has widely influenced the design of customer services at Bank of Scotland, Halifax and Lloyds TSB (now Lloyds Group). The ERPE metric and the use methodology it relies on have been adopted by enterprises in several service industry sectors — telephony, retail, travel and financial services. Since 2008 the use and impact has been predominantly in the financial services sector and is encountered on a daily basis by the millions of retail and commercial banking customers who use internet banking, mobile phone banking and telephone banking services that have been created based on the ERPE metric.
ERPE has had intimate collaborations with Lloyds Banking Group, who have now adopted our refined usability metric into their business on a significant scale. Since 2008 their business benefits have been five times their £7.1 M investment in the ERPE research programme.
Research on software architectures and reengineering helped Portuguese IT company ATX develop automated migration tools. A report by IT research company Gartner in 2009 identified the collaboration as one of the company's key strengths. The partnership allowed ATX to sustain an innovative R&D programme and win business in a competitive market.
Impact occurred via:
The same research also helped local SME Hunter Systems to redesign their products for the Web.
Gateway technologies have enhanced the ability of end-users to engage with high-performance computing (HPC) programs on massively distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs) such as clusters, grids and clouds. The technologies are focussed on the needs of business, industry, organisations and communities; enabling them to extract added business and social benefit from custom high-value services running on a wide range of high-performance DCIs. Typically, such services are based on computational workflows tailored to specific business needs. DCIs may comprise resources already owned (eg. clusters) combined with resources rented on a pay-as-you- go basis (eg. clouds). Several companies and organisations worldwide are currently using the technologies.
This case study focuses on the research conducted by members of the UoA examining the services offered to service users and carers in secure settings. This includes forensic mental health services and prisons. It has had a significant impact on the development of professional practice in secure settings based on the views, experiences, and needs of service users and carers. It has established service user and carer engagement in research conducted in secure settings. It has also informed service and policy developments in the United Kingdom and internationally.
KCL research played an essential role in the development of data provenance standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body for web technologies, which is responsible for HTTP, HTML, etc. The provenance of data concerns records of the processes by which data was produced, by whom, from what other data, and similar metadata. The standards directly impact on practitioners and professional services through adoption by commercial, governmental and other bodies, such as Oracle, IBM, and Nasa, in handling computational records of the provenance of data.
While indexes exist that measure the maturity of the provision of eGovernment services from the government perspective (e.g. UN eGovernment Development Index, http://unpan3.un.org/egovkb/global_reports/12report.htm), there are no reliable standards that incorporate the citizen perspective into benchmarking of government effectiveness. Brunel research has included both government and citizen assessments and, through a more holistic approach to eGovernment evaluation, has helped Turkey and other governments to improve their e-government services.
EU funded CEES (Citizen-Oriented Evaluation of e-government Services) project delivered a new evaluation model, called COBRA (Cost, Opportunity, Benefit, Risk Analysis), for benchmarking e-government services from the citizens' perspective. CEES led to COBRA's adoption by Turksat, the Turkish central e-government service provider which has 12 million citizen users — leading to e-government service improvement and more favourable citizen attitudes. E-government service providers such as ictQATAR and OMSAR (Office of the Minister of State for Administrative Reform) have adopted the COBRA framework to evaluate and improve their e-government services in Qatar and Lebanon respectively. COBRA has also been used in UK and Estonia leading to similar outcomes.
This research outcome enabled the launch of a new project, called I-MEET, that is extending the COBRA framework to include governments' perspectives and is being applied to Qatar, Lebanon and the UK.
Research at Newcastle has made a significant contribution to the public services modernisation agenda in the areas of inter-agency working and information-sharing. The research showed that effective information-sharing required not just that different information systems are made compatible with each other, but also that people from different professional cultures are enabled to work together through a common understanding of information governance issues. In active collaboration with a range of service providers, a number of processes and tools were developed for the significant benefit of service users. They have been implemented in a variety of policy settings, including children's services and adult social care, and have informed current programmes funded by the UK government.
Healthy Living Pharmacies (HLPs) represent a new concept in community pharmacy services designed to meet public health needs through a nationally agreed but locally commissioned tiered framework. The White Paper, Pharmacy in England: Building on strengths, delivering the future, published in April 2008 described the role community pharmacy could play in supporting public health: "Pharmacies will become healthy living centres: promoting and supporting healthy living and health literacy; offering patients and the public healthy lifestyle advice, support on self care and a range of pressing public health concerns; treating minor ailments and; supporting patients with long-term conditions". A national framework for HLPs was developed then ratified by the National Public Health Leadership Forum for pharmacy (PHLFP) in January 2010. This was tested in Portsmouth Primary Care Trust. Findings of the project led to the HLP concept being rolled out across England in 2012 to 20 pathfinder sites (areas, regions, site sounds like an individual pharmacy) involving 100 pharmacies. As of March 2013, there were 478 HLPs across 28 areas and presently there are 721 HLPs in over 35 areas. There are a range of impacts that can be demonstrated from this research including changes to community practice and government policy; increase in public use of pharmacies and improved patient outcomes.
This case study reports the impact on businesses and practitioners of model-driven software architecture research, workflow-based application development, and intelligent computing through a series of connected JISC, Knowledge Connect projects, and, especially, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.
Key impacts for software companies, related to their software development processes and products, include the adoption of the model-driven architecture approach, showing:
Integration of intelligent computing in the form of data mining and decision support in software processes and products.