Digital evolution using Microsoft Power Apps. Delivering a ‘Vulnerability Tracker’ application and ‘Visitor Expenses’ Portal.
Microsoft Power App, Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Pages Implementation and Customisation, Training and Support.
“We’ve been working with Ingentive who are complete experts in the Microsoft environment to develop a technology which allows us to manage our vulnerabilities in a really efficient and cutting-edge way, so there’s been a lot of interest in what we’re doing with them across the sector.”
– Rachel Bence, Chief Information Officer
From the Vulnerability Tracker we built for Queen Mary, their cyber health impact score has improved from 72% to 86%, and this continues to better month-on-month.
Identifying The Problem
Queen Mary University London (QMUL) is one of the oldest universities in the UK. A member of the Russell Group of Universities, it has six campuses across East and Central London in Mile End, Whitechapel, Charterhouse Square, Ilford, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and West Smithfield, as well as an international presence in China, France, Greece and Malta. The Mile End campus is the largest self-contained campus of any London-based university. In 2018/19 the university had around 26,000 students.
As such a large university, Queen Mary were seeing challenges in managing their expense process for medical research volunteers and non-staff, and wanted to ensure they were remaining at the forefront of cybersecurity – with threats and attacks on the rise around the world.
Addressing the Challenge
To tackle these points, we developed two applications for QMUL – the “Vulnerability Tracker” and the “Visitor Expenses” Apps.
The Vulnerability Tracker monitors activity across all devices on the estate and using ingested data from virus and threat data feeds, tries to intercept by determining which devices are susceptible to the problems before they happen. This creates a considerable saving on downtime, prevents spread and secures the hardware asset estate.
Our process when assessing the suitability and readiness for Power Platform within an organisation often leads to a key question: “Where do we start?”. To measure the impact that the platform can have for an organisation, a Proof-of-Concept/Pilot/Minimum Viable Product implementation is the ideal way to soft-launch the product set, create awareness and generate interest.
With QMUL, we started with a Ideation Workshop. This Ideation Workshop was the discovery session where we met with university stakeholders, triaged the areas of the organisation that are experiencing process pain or issues with legacy systems, and then scored these – creating a table of priorities from which we selected the launch of activities.
Using three metrics: Complexity, Time to Value and Overall Investment, we then played back the backlog of projects and prioritise them. From here, 1-2 pilots were selected for QMUL, and the project was scoped to deliver their application.
We don’t lead client interactions with products, but always try to best understand the business challenges and apply the technology appropriately. Many low code solutions now available empower the end users to create – but these needs governance, and we delivered a Center of Excellence service as an initial workshop upfront, leaving behind a framework of compliance and metrics to track usage and behaviours. From our collaboration with QMUL, we identified that the university needed better applications to manage their cybersecurity, and expense process for anyone working at or with the institution.
Celebrating the results
As an outcome, we developed two applications so far for QMUL – the “Vulnerability Tracker” and the “Visitor Expenses” App. From the Vulnerability Tracker, Queen Mary’s Cyber Health Impact score has improved from 72% to 86%, and this continues to better month on month.
The Visitor Expenses App will be released company-wide soon, and intends to save time and money for the university by creating a portal for non-staff (Volunteers, Guests, Speakers etc) who need to claim expenses but are not on the QMUL tenant or payroll. The app will allow them to submit details and receipts of each claim and track the progress of these. Within QMUL, the accounts team aggregate the data, post batches into their Agresso system, which will speed up the time to payment processing time, and reduce drop-outs from medical research programmes – for which the very manual Excel-based expenses payment process had created a huge issue.
Overall, QMUL are now better equipped to manage the entirety of their cybersecurity landscape, as well as their expenses and accounts across the vast volume of staff, students, guests, volunteers and visiting lecturers and temporary staff.
