Providing Strategic IT Advisory and Delivery for Anthony Nolan

The Challenge

Provide strategic IT advisory and delivery services to support Anthony Nolan’s vision to save and improve the lives of everyone who needs a stem cell transplant.

Anthony Nolan is a charity that matches incredible individuals willing to donate their blood stem cells or bone marrow to people with blood cancer and blood disorders who desperately need lifesaving transplants. 

Founded in 1974 Anthony Nolan now has a register, in the UK, of more than 600k potential donors, which it uses to help more than 1k people a year.   It also works closely with the World Marrow Donor Association joining the global registers to provide international matches.

To help achieve its vision to save and improve the lives of everyone who needs a stem cell transplant, Anthony Nolan wanted to refresh key IT systems. It needed a long-term IT strategy, a new IT architecture design, an understanding of the skills it required and a delivery plan.  The charity brought in Softwire, initially to advise on the strategic roadmap and to work with them to deliver the improvements.

Our Solution

We quickly understood Anthony Nolan’s needs and identified the IT systems it would require to achieve them. We then partnered with the charity to deliver transformational improvements.

Our detailed discovery enabled us to understand Anthony Nolan’s business-level goals and how its IT architecture, skills and processes needed to evolve to support these.

We worked with the charity on a new strategic architecture and implementation plan.  Anthony Nolan then asked us to partner it on its transformation journey, providing strategic IT advisory and delivery services. 

The first project was to overhaul the front-end of the search system that Anthony Nolan’s team uses to find possible donor matches for patients. We worked closely with them on developing the user interface improvements, including adding features to better support the way the search team worked. All of this was aimed at helping find the best-matched donors more efficiently. 

Anthony Nolan also changed the sample collections method for new donors joining the register, which meant it needed a new system to record and process incoming data. With a tight deadline, Softwire played a key role in building and rolling this out, enabling Anthony Nolan to switch to its new method ahead of its busiest sign-up period

The Result

We’ve made it more efficient for Anthony Nolan to match potential UK donors to patients.

Softwire’s initial strategic work for Anthony Nolan has made an immediate difference. The charity now has a clear picture of the IT systems and skills it needs to underpin its growth plans. It also has a trusted partner to advise and deliver