AXIA digital

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Happy Christmas and New Year to all our customers and supporters.

This has been an exciting year for the company. It seems strange to write this when this has been a challenging and strange year. For many of our customers, especially those working in the Health sector, we know how difficult this year has been. There is an earlier story on this site, of how we have used the flexibility of our technology to support them and this continues.

Nevertheless, this has been a year where we have had the opportunity to work on many major projects. In September, all trainee Dentists in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were switched from the two previous e-portfolio systems to the integrated e-portfolio we provide. It was pleasure to hear at a recent meeting how well the new system has been received.

We have worked with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society to provide a range of assessment pathways for Pharmacists at all levels in the profession. Again, it has been great to hear the positive reception to our work.

Another positive development this year has been the fact that many of our long-standing customers have strengthened their commitment to the company, both through extending their contracts and committing to new work. The creation of Axia Digital (Ireland) has also opened up new opportunities in this important market for us.

We are therefore looking forward to 2021 and know that the team will be coming back in January to a full programme of work.

As they reflect on the past year, joint owners Richard Etheridge and Chris Peat wanted to express their thanks to our customers and colleagues.

‘We are grateful to all our customers who have again proved to be great collaborators in meeting our objective, to produce sites that provide a high-quality experience to all their users. This year they have stretched and prompted us to produce some of our very best work. This work though can only be produced through the efforts of our highly talented team, to whom we offer our thanks, for the way they have adjusted to working from home and for their commitment to the company.’

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Axia Digital staff team is increasing and strengthening

Chris Rowley has settled quickly into his role as Senior Developer and Software Team Leader with the company.

Chris is a Business Process and Software Solutions specialist with over 25 years of industry experience.  He has managed and provided I.T. solutions to some of the World’s largest, mass participation sporting events; a successful airline and holiday company; banking, and other organisations in both the public and private sectors.

In over 13 years as a Project Manager, he has demonstrated an ability to shape solutions that meet each user’s requirements and the business need, whilst all the time communicating the journey with stakeholders.  Chris has already applied these skills to the company’s latest site for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

We asked him to share his first impressions of the company’s technology.

‘Since joining the Axia Digital team in June I have been amazed and impressed by the rapid development process the team executes.  Everything the team produces, is done using every day, development technologies, SQL Server back end, C# business logic and middle tier and HTML, CSS, Bootstrap front end with a sprinkling of JavaScript and JQuery magic thrown in. Nothing particularly special there. 

What makes Axia different is how an ever-evolving middle tier, that is the backbone of every solution and manages all the heavy lifting of the applications from security, data access, business rules application, roles management, object CRUD tasks is creatively allied to a highly sophisticated administration toolset, that allows pretty much any business object model, to be quickly and safely built; whilst all the time providing the assurance that the delivered product will be rock solid. 

In 25 years of involvement with I.T. companies large and small, I have never seen such bespoke, customer-driven requirements delivered to a live, deployed site in such remarkably short periods of time, a handful of weeks as against maybe six to nine months or more!  Coupled with the vision that the delivered product should be maintainable by the end client’s staff with minimal training should they wish or by the Axia team as a managed service throughout its lifetime and natural evolution.’

Another recent recruit to the business is Bryan Magistrado who joins for his placement year from Huddersfield University. He joins an impressive list of other staff who have studied there; Max, Yaz and Chris.

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Helping our customers meet the challenges posed by Covid 19

A significant proportion of the company’s business is in the health sector and therefore it will be not be a surprise that we have actively been supporting many of our customers meet the challenges presented by Covid 19.

The configurability of our software has meant we have been able to make rapid changes to our sites even for some of our newest customers.

Last year Health Education England selected the company to create an e-portfolio for Dentists involved on post qualification training programmes across England and Wales. The site is now built and been well received, prior to being used in earnest by trainees from September.

However due to Covid 19 the training programmes of last year’s graduates have been disrupted because of the closure of Dental practices and the programme for the new graduates has had to been altered to reflect the fact that they will also have reduced access to practice.

The Axia Digital team has had to work rapidly both to adapt the existing practice assessments and to provide additional assessments for this year’s student. All this has been achieved on time whilst still retaining all the features of the existing programme, for when full access to practice becomes available.

The development of the e-portfolio for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society also posed a similar challenge. The RPS working in conjunction with Health Education England, had to quickly to adapt their Foundation programme to create a Provisional Foundation Programme which reflects the challenges faced by new Pharmacists, entering a highly demanding working environment.

Working closely with the team at the RPS the portfolio to support the programme was developed in five weeks and has already been soft launched. The team is now moving on to expand the e-portfolio so that it can be used by Pharmacists working at Consultant Practice level.

Alongside this work we have made quick changes to many of the Practice Assessment portfolios we provide to Nursing courses in response to the changing patterns of placements as a result of the demands on hospitals due to Covid 19.

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Axia Digital and CORONAVIRUS / COVID-19

CORONAVIRUS – Update

Axia Digital, like most companies, has been following government advice in relation to the uncertainty regarding the CORONAVIRUS / COVID-19.  We have been planning for several weeks, following the new advice last night from the Prime Minister, we have decided to move our team from working in our office environment to working from home.  This was put into effect this morning and hopefully, you will have found that if you have contacted us, it has been business as normal.

Our business continuity plan has been implemented which allows the business to continue in times such as these and has the full support of the company’s board.  The team have all been working as they normally do, only remotely.  We have a series of tools and processes that we use to manage our work and these are either virtual or easily virtualised.  Our aim is to maintain the levels of customer service we normally provide and aim to exceed it if we can.

Our suppliers are implementing similar plans and are keeping us up-to-date with their plans as they are implemented.  We do not anticipate any unplanned interruptions in the services we provide and we will continue to work on support issues and any development you have asked us to undertake or are in the process of asking us to undertake.

Simply put we expect business as usual.

While the news and information surrounding the COVID-19 coronavirus continue to evolve, we are working diligently to stay informed and take all the necessary safeguards to ensure the health and safety of our employees, partners and customers.  As such, we are following the guidance of government authorities and world health professionals in ensuring our decisions are in line with their recommendations and that we are minimising any risk to our team.  We have suspended all non-essential business travel with immediate effect.

Initially, our phones will divert to an answer machine with messages being sent to the team immediately.  We will respond to voice calls as soon as possible.  Please continue to contact us in the normal ways that you have done previously.

Please continue to send support to support@axiainteractive.net

We hope that all our customers remain safe and look forward to working with you over the coming weeks.

Kind regards
Richard and Chris

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Reflections on our history; not just a technology company

Our preparations for our forthcoming ISO 9001 and 27001 inspections have prompted a purge of all the documents we have accumulated over the past 20 years, in part to create space for paper-free desks. You would have thought that as a company committed to electronic systems that we would have already been on top of this, but we are an IT case of ‘physician heal thyself’!

As the primary guilty party for this, I have been the one clearing out the company papers. It has reminded me of all the work we have done. It’s easy to forget some of it. Not because it was work we would rather not be associated with, there is very little of that, more because we have moved on. What though jumps out is how those ‘long forgotten’ projects have added to our collective corporate intelligence, that we continue to offer to all our present projects.

In our early days, we developed not only online guidance tools to help adults with their career choices but numerous other online diagnostic and planning tools. Dealing with the new challenge of customising these online assessments for specific regions of Italy, prompted us to develop the ability to easily customise content for specific groups. Our work with numerous training providers delivering NVQs and now apprenticeships, helped us to understand and develop complex hierarchies of roles for the assessment of skills. Assisting an area-based organisation to track the impact of guidance interviews, taught us how to manage data across multiple and different databases.

    

There are several attempts to produce strategy papers to describe our offer although it is also apparent that various new markets are opened by unexpected opportunities. Developing a site for nurse prescribers at a University, ultimately led to our supporting the practice assessment of all students on health-based courses. Through it all through our commitment to understanding our customer’s needs and creating sites that meet their requirements is apparent.

We can only do what we have done because of our technology and the bank transfers to colleagues in Canada, serve as a reminder that the Axia in our company name, derives from our previous owner Axia NetMedia corporation who were responsible for the operation of the Alberta SuperNet. Still having colleagues in Canada and the UK who are used to managing big data has supported our work on sites with big data sets; we now have one with over 800k users.

Today, I am on my way to a discussion about the equivalence route for the Academy for Advance Practice. The technology piece is almost complete. However, the core part of the discussion will be about records of evidence, how much? how do we evidence validity? It will echo the one I had last week with nurses at the Simon community in Dublin, which was about what and how do I capture my professional development in an environment full of new and daily challenges, many of which require new development and learning.

Different contexts but essentially the same sort of discussion we have been involved in throughout our history. The solution as always is a combination of the application of sound principles of assessment and making the best use of technology, to provide an intuitive as possible pathway through that assessment journey.

At the meeting, I will be endeavouring to contribute our technology and our collective experience and knowledge developed over 20 years.

Our unique offer lies in our ability to deliver to our customers exactly what they require. We do not have products but instead a platform which we can use to mirror our customer processes. None of our customers need to change what they do to fit into our system, our system is flexible enough to reflect what they currently do and enhance the user’s experience.

Since 1997 AXIA Digital has been helping organisations capture and assess skills and competencies that are demonstrated in a professional setting or in the workplace. We create leading edge digital solutions, which mirror and then enhance existing assessment systems. Our solutions are all individually hand crafted but are deployed on the same platform.

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