Pros
A relatively little heard of company with a strong heritage that often give’s people their first start within IT. Pleasant offices and location (as long as you drive a car), and what seems to be a genuine belief in what they are doing to try and make people’s lives better. The majority of the staff who do the actual “getting their hands dirty” day-to-day work are extremely dedicated to what they do and try to create a friendly and welcoming environment.
Cons
EMIS Health used to be a fairly small, well focused company that did one thing and did it well with a good ethos, strong direction, and a high degree of customer engagement and co-operation. It has more recently gone down the “increase our presence” route and expanded into areas outside its traditional GP focused market. Whilst this has been great for the shareholders and investors, it has not gone down well for the way the company does it’s day-to-day work and the company is now beginning to pay the price for the poor implementation of that growth. Its products are lacking the quality that used to be the companies trademark with a delivery practice that seems to consist of get it to market and fix it later. There is a seeming desire to make it capable of doing everything and anything and letting the overall experience of using it suffer as a result. Whereas when speaking to customers they would be happy with a few less features if the core product was solid, reliable, and could be relied on to do its job without issues, EMIS seems to be more concerned on whether it can have the latest new thing or has exactly the same features their competitors have. There have been a lot of changes in the development teams that produce the software which has also contributed to a lot of the current issues in the company, most noticeably through a poor adopting of Agile practices (via 2 weeks training to make everyone agile…. but only the development teams… in a couple of the office…..) and a basic misunderstanding of what it entails (project managers that don’t actually get involved with the teams doing the work they just want progress updates, architecture done on the back of a beermat and never updated, happily accepting no customer involvement in design or feedback, no R+D on the impact introducing new features or architecture, etc.) There used to be a running joke that EMIS never sacked anyone. Whilst this is not a bad thing and employee loyalty is something every company strives for, this has also led to issues and “career” workers within the company. . It has helped foster the impression of promotion through “if your face fits” simply because of the length of time people have worked there. Conversely it has also led to promotions because of the time spent there rather than ability. This is apparent in certain areas where the “EMIS way of doing things” cannot now be challenged or changed. It has also caused problems in that now there is a belief that 3 years spent their equals X role, 5 years equals Y role and even poorly skilled or performing staff are expecting a promotion simply for sticking with the company. This has ultimately led to something of a brain-drain where those who can do and are ambitious eventually leave - the recent restructuring being a prime example of this. Working in healthcare has a pull that online gambling never will have but everyone still has to pay the mortgage.