In early 2018, the Federal CIO published the President’s Management Agenda laying out a long-term vision for modernizing the federal government focused on improving agencies ability to deliver mission outcomes, improve services, and more effectively steward taxpayer dollars. Of the three key drivers, "modernizing information technology" is perhaps one of the most daunting for CIO’s and their IT organizations who are facing austere budgets and the growing need to enhance security for sensitive data and systems. The FY2018 budget included $80 billion in IT and cybersecurity funding, representing a 5.2 percent increase from FY2017. However, this will not be enough for CIO’s to meet demands and reverse the historic trend where roughly 80 percent of agencies' IT budgets are spent on Operations and Maintenance (O&M) and provisioned IT services (Figure 1). This leaves only 20 percent or less to meet rapidly expanding IT Development, Modernization and Enhancement (DME) needs. While commercial, state government, and educational organization face similar challenges around IT budget splits their percentages are slightly more favorable.
The lack of available of IT modernization capital investment dollars at lower organizational levels has more direct impact, as rapid technology advancements, user demands, and mission needs increase almost daily. This is especially critical for improving service availability, growing big data concerns, protecting data, and better securing IT systems and services. We find our clients can no longer make investment decisions that provide return on investment (ROI) over time. Instead, immediate cost-avoidance solutions and services are desired that not only enhance user services but reduce legacy O&M costs for repurposing toward IT enhancements. While many CIO’s are looking for new innovative approaches to reverse this trend, we find the solution to be less about new unproven approaches than effectively applying proven cost-avoiding IT Service Management (ITSM) best practices. ITSM is not proscriptive by nature meaning “one-size” doesn’t fit all. Instead to consistently improve the user experience while reducing O&M costs for repurposing requires ITSM be uniquely applied within each IT enterprise. We find collaboration and process discipline essential to achieving service enhancements that trace to mission objectives, maximize investments, and improve security. Improving client’s ITSM strategy allows a move away from technology-oriented approaches to ones that develop, deliver and maintain IT systems as lines of service.
For example, for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over an 8-year period Vision consistently reduced O&M labor cost and dramatically increased quality of service as measured by EPA’s staff. Vision helped reduce staff by one-third, saving an average of $3M per year, which was repurposed for EPA IT modernization. During this same time, Quality of Service increased from a low Satisfactory (62%) to a high Excellent (95%) rating (Figure 2).
Key to success was a seamless, collaborative ITSM service strategy transitioning from a stove-piped environment to a robust enterprise Lines-of-Service model. Support staunchly adhered to an Incident Management service request, execution and delivery process. It established mature process documentation and compliance procedures and aggressively identified, measured and monitored key performance indicators. By embedding continuous improvement processes, greater labor efficiencies and ticket reductions were achieved enabling more cost avoidance. For modern IT to function as the backbone of how the federal government better serves the public and keeps sensitive data secure, O&M cost avoidance is essential for freeing up significant portions of O&M budget dollars. We find achieving this without mission impact doesn’t require new thinking, instead the more effective application of ITSM strategies and approaches within the existing IT Enterprise and its services.
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