Key Takeaways:

• Government agencies are adopting "digital workspaces" to provide personnel and citizens access to apps, data, networks and other IT services anytime, anywhere and on multiple devices. 
• The focus on always-available connectivity and high-quality digital experiences means that IT service management, especially for organizations leveraging managed services, has to become user-centric to drive productivity and mission completion.  
• A service integration and management partner like SAIC helps agencies optimize service cost, quality and risk for managed services by leveraging four "performance pillars": user experience, operational efficiency, service intelligence and business outcomes.

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Private-sector companies and businesses have tapped into cloud, automation, AI and other digital transformation technologies to give workforces and consumers high-caliber IT services for work and play. Now, the wave of providing commercial-quality digital experiences is spreading across government. Agencies want to deliver that same anytime, anywhere access to applications and data, communication and collaboration, networks and support for end users on multiple devices.

Today, personnel perform their work between desktop, mobile and tablet devices and expect to see data continuity and personalized interfaces whenever and wherever they are. Many agencies have called upon commercial partners to assist with creating these omnichannel “digital workspaces” that allow personnel, as well as citizen customers for public-facing organizations, to get things done efficiently and in the ways they prefer.

This user-centric IT paradigm, focused on personalization and effortless connectivity, is driven by the fact that constituents’ interactions with technology and services ultimately dictate mission success through outcomes and productivity. It means enterprise systems must work seamlessly, and service disruptions must be remedied proactively and responsively. It also means anticipating service demand and capacity needs, knowing when disruptions could hit, and making sure IT environments are secure and resilient but do not consume unnecessary resources and costs despite being “always on.”

Effective IT service management in this era of digital workspaces and constrained budgets requires operational and financial excellence. Agencies can achieve this through performance management around four interconnected “performance pillars”: user experience, operational efficiency, service intelligence and business outcomes. And, as agencies outsource more IT capabilities to commercial providers to operate as managed services, they seek better orchestration of all the services with multi-sourcing service integration (MSI) support from mission-experienced technology and service integrators like SAIC.

“Agencies want to get in front of end-to-end enterprise performance, but many have segmented managed services,” said Steve Radabaugh, director of SAIC’s U-Centric service management. “By providing real-time visibility into costs, operations and user perceptions in a holistic way through orchestration, agencies have the service intelligence to make accurate, continuous improvements to their enterprise IT. This also leads to faster deployment of performance-building innovations and assures desired user and mission outcomes.”

Flipping the script on IT service management

In user-centric service management, the four performance pillars' alignment within a unified framework and delivery ecosystem is especially important for agencies that need to orchestrate complex cross-tower deliveries. Executing on this type of framework requires a coordinated combination of management and measurement processes, tech and analytics to synthesize vendors, staff, resources and systems for smooth, outcome-based service delivery. The advantage of partnering with a technology and service integrator in this effort is that it provides the MSI expertise and tooling, interconnected with those from commercial service partners, as part of a fixed-price contract.

With a proper service management framework in place, agencies can more quickly gain enterprise-wide benefits, including greater user satisfaction and productivity, fewer service disruptions and less severe IT incidents. An MSI integrator's holistic management of the agency's own dedicated infrastructures and platforms with those from managed service providers results in efficiencies and lower cost of ownership. Service delivery follows modern approaches that match resource capacities to demand levels and patterns of business activity.

Service management gains end-to-end enterprise control

SAIC has been partnering with civilian and defense agencies on implementing the user-centric delivery model in their enterprise IT managed service journeys, including the Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA). We are supporting those aiming to improve their user experiences, operational efficiency, service intelligence and business outcomes with components of our U-Centric service management suite, which includes tailoring frameworks, processes, tech and tools to their unique operating structures. 

The agencies are rolling out specific capabilities based on the different stages of their journeys and therefore needs. These range from increased automation and AI at service delivery touchpoints for end users as well as for IT staff performing back-end operations, to greater metrics for managing IT spending and vendors, to organizational change management. We designed U-Centric to be plug-and-play and fit almost any IT environment as required.

However, the benefits are maximized when all of the modular capabilities of U-Centric are leveraged, coordinated and underpinned by a single-pane-of-glass management platform with centralized dashboards, analytics and tools. The platform provides 360-degree visibility and control of the enterprise environment, and the tool set can be tailored with a mix of SAIC, commercial and customer-preferred solutions.

Learn more about the SAIC's enterprise IT solutions at our Enterprise IT page.