After Anaeko Great success at Think G - Cloud event in London earlier this month, with some great feedback on Shared Services within Government Cloud.

Anaeko have published an article in Think. Cloud for Government magazine based on the importance of a Service Management tool-set to support the implementation ok UK Government's IT Strategy.

Government Organizations need to Implement a Service Management tool-set to support the implementation of UK Government’s IT Strategy

Between 2008 and 2009 the Labour Government spent round £16 billion on IT. A series of measures are now being taken by the coalition government to cut costs and reduce the size of its IT projects. These include:

• Data Centre Rationalization

There will be significant rationalisation of the governments data centre estate in order to implement a commodity approach to hosting. This will lead to increase utilisation and efficiency, thus reducing CO2 emissions, accommodation and energy costs.

• Shared Services

The Next Generation Shared Services Strategic Plan outlines how government organizations will work together to share functions such as HR, procurement, finance and payroll to deliver potential savings of between £400 and £600 million a year in administration costs.

• New SME Focus

On the 11th February 2011 the Prime Minister announced a package of measures designed to make sure that SMEs can successfully compete for Government business. There is a target that 25% of Central Government procurement spend should go to SMEs by the end of this Parliament in 2015.

• Public Cloud First Strategy

In future, when procuring new or existing services, public sector organizations will have to consider and fully evaluate potential cloud solutions first. Many of these solutions will be available for reuse from the Government CloudStore.

• Disaggregation of Large SI Projects

The Government ICT Strategy published in March 2011 stated that where possible, the Government will move away from expensive, long-duration bespoke solutions to become consumers of widely available, ever improving mass-market products and solutions. There is a presumption in the strategy that no project will be greater than £100 million. As G-Cloud services and other frameworks become the primary sourcing route for IT across government, and the number of providers extends even further, there will be a disintegration of current, traditional integration services, where providers have end to end responsibility for significant portions of the government estates.

The Service Management Challenge.

Future Government ICT services will be delivered by combining niche services from a large number of service providers, where best-of-breed services are aggregated and centrally governed under a single service management framework. This will require government organizations to implement new service management processes and tooling to monitor, measure and report on the delivery of IT business value.

Government must accelerate the introduction of IT service performance measures that are aligned to business service outcomes. KPIs must be expressed in business terms in order to strengthen the link between IT value and business outcomes. This will require government organizations to implement service level management tooling to monitor, measure and report on the delivery of IT business value.

Anaeko’s ServiceClarity provides such a service level management framework. It has been specifically designed to support multi-tiered SLAs so that underpinning SLAs with all contributing service providers can be related to the overarching SLAs of the business services. Through a unique cloud connector architecture, ServiceClarity supports the measurement of multi-vendor, multi-sourcing, hybrid cloud environments and implements a service management layer that ensures the delivery of IT Business Value: See www.serviceclarity.com.