It seems like I've spent the last six weeks living out of a suitcase while visiting several government customers. What I've learned from all this travel is that living out of a suitcase stinks. Joke aside, what I've really discovered is both surprising and shocking to me: If you're in government IT, you should be providing IT as a service. If you're not, you should be planning to provide IT as a service. If you're not doing that, you'll soon be out of a job.
Bold words you say? Hyperbole you think? Well then, think about this:
You, government IT, now have IT-savvy customers (agency-employees, citizen tax-payers) who are also wise to what IT services should cost. You, government IT, are competing directly with private sector to provide everything and anything IT: from raw infrastructure to business applications. The consequences of your customer's newly found IT-awareness has, in some cases, been traumatic. IT organizations are seeing an accelerated loss in business to private sector competitors. Just as troubling, some IT organizations report having traditional IT functions moved away from them and placed directly within the business units they once supported. These days, I'm talking with just as many COOs, CFOs, and Business Directors as I am CIOs and IT Directors. I think my new audience members reflect the potentially diminishing role of traditional IT organizations.
If government IT is to thrive, or at least survive, than government IT organizations must move towards the Service Provider model (as opposed to the traditional, asset-based cost-center model). In order to succeed as an IT Service Provider, government IT organizations must focus on three capabilities:
1. Fully Optimize Your IT Infrastructure
To be cost-competitive, you will need to squeeze every ounce of computing available from your entire IT infrastructure. Additionally, you will need to support multiple "customers" to increase utilization and therefore further lower the costs of IT services you provide. Virtual machines, like vSphere, are a great start but they're not enough; you must also fully virtualize your network and storage infrastructure. A layer of software virtualization needs to be inserted between your entire physical IT infrastructure and the applications and data you support. Once all infrastructure is virtualized, you'll be able to fully optimize your physical infrastructure and better rely upon commodity hardware as opposed to highly specialized network, storage, and security gear. In addition, you'll be able to apply greater automation to lower operating costs, improve security, and provider better quality of services. This is the promise of the Software Defined Data Center. You cannot be cost-effective enough to be competitive if you're not abstracting, pooling, and automating your entire IT infrastructure.
2. Understand Your Costs
You need a clear understanding of your underlying IT costs: hardware, software, labor, facilities, insurance, etc. Most clients still track and manage costs with a cadre of spreadsheets and an army of cost analysts. This approach usually yields inaccurate results and is extremely cost-ineffective. Providing price-competitive IT services means you must have a single, fact-based, source of truth for all your IT costs. You must have the ability to map and aggregate those costs to the IT services you provide. Without this capability, you're either charging your customers too much, or you're bleeding money and won't know you're knocking on death's door until it's too late. VMware's ITBM platform, along with our experienced consulting services, can help you understand your true IT costs and how best to price and offer services based upon proven cost models.
3. Provide Superior Customer Service
It's all about the customer. Your customers (agency employees and citizens) need to know you care about their success and that you're providing the services they need and expect. You need to address their needs and resolve their problems quickly: in a self-service, friction-free manner when desired; and in a highly-interactive fashion when needed. IT services must be provided from an online catalog, which clearly describes the service and cost, along with any options or constraints. The client, in most cases, should be able to order the service without any interaction from IT and the service should be provisioned immediately. VMware's vCloud Automation Center is a proven platform for providing this type of excellent customer service. You also need a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to effectively market and sell to your customers, and to understand their needs and issues. In addition, you must have a Service Incident Management system in place to quickly and correctly resolve customer issues when they occur. Ideally, your provisioning software (e.g. vCAC), CRM system, and Service Incident Management system will be highly integrated and automated in order to provide the best possible customer experience at the lowest cost possible.
Are you providing IT as a service today? If not, do you have a plan? If not, what's going to be your next career move?
I work with government IT organizations to help lower costs and improve IT capabilities through Cloud, SDDC, End User Computing technologies. Please contact me @ mstockwell@vmware.com if you are interested in learning how VMware can help you do more with less.