In-sourcing ITIL/SIAM

Working in an organisation with good leadership and clear vision is critical to the success of any project. In the public sector, this is especially important when delivering strategically important change and transformation, and ensuring a new direction for technology and operating is embedded into the culture.

A central government department customer set a new vision to move away from their traditional fully outsourced SIAM* (ITIL) activity as part of a multi-million pound outsourcing model. They asked Gray Blue to deliver the transformation to a fully insourced SIAM solution and in doing so take back full control of their information technology supply chain.

The deliverables had to include:

Developing internal skills and talent
Reviewing and replacing tooling and systems
Managing the impact on existing technology suppliers
Understanding commercial and procurement obligations
Scoping and enabling TUPE
Organisation design and restructuring

Initial Engagement – What Is Achievable and What Are The Benefits and Risks

The initial engagement was to ensure a strategy, supported by a robust business case and plan was developed and approved by the executive.

Due to the nature of insourcing and outsourcing projects there is always an element of confidentiality. This can bring a number of challenges when it comes to fully understanding the scope of the activities that need to be completed and understanding the impact of the changes on the organisations involved.

Building a business case with sufficient contingency and fully appreciating the risks involved is required to ensure confidence. The appetite for risk changes from organisation to organisation.

Delivering Transformation – Building Internal Resource

The transformation programme began clearly understanding the impact this change would have on the existing suppliers and working with them closely to deliver the transformation required.

As part of this understanding the existing talent was essential. ITIL is a well documented framework for delivery IT services management. Understanding and benchmarking existing processes and skills within the organisations enabled a detailed gap analysis to be understood.

“We are now in a position where we can manage our outsourced IT cost more effectively and we can use our own civil service talent to deliver more value to our service users.”

The systems and processes that supported the outsourced service needed to be fully remapped to work within an insource environment. Training on new processes and critical training on ITIL best practice was part of the transformation programme. What and why things are being done are essential for successful transformation and on-going process improvement post transformation.

Legacy Systems

A parallel project to replace the legacy system was also required to deliver the full benefits available from insourcing. Working on both increased risk, but they also ensured a complete break from legacy ways of working, enabled improved efficiencies and assisted with TUPE negotiations.

Prioritising areas of ITIL also enabled transformation to take place without impacting the business services and ensuring focus on the critical areas first – de-risking in-sourcing SIAM.

People Matter

Programmes of this nature are very personal to the people they impact at both the customer and supplier organisations. Clear communication was essential through-out the process to ensure that a smooth transition to the new insourced operating model was achieved. We never forget people matter.

“Having exceptional people leadership, strong governance and controls during a major transformation was essential to the success of the programme.”

Appendix:

SIAM (service integration and management) – SIAM is a service that is typically outsourced to an independent organisation to manage the technology towers in a outsourced IT model. Traditional outsourcing enabled a single supplier to manage all of the technology requirements, in a tower model there are multiple suppliers that provide specific areas of technology. The SIAM provider manages and controls these suppliers on behalf of the contracting organisation and reports on the other suppliers and itself in accordance with the agreed contract.

“Tower Model” – the “tower model” is a version of outsourcing that enables different suppliers to manage different areas of technology. This model enables suppliers who are experts in specific technology areas to work and own specific areas, for example, Printing, Network, End User Computing, Data Centres etc. The suppliers are typically managed by another independent supplier that acts as the service integrator.

SME – subject manager expert.