Seeking greater innovation, optimised services and operational excellence? Service integration and management could be the answer!

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are looking to service integration and management as the key strategy to deliver greater outcomes such as collaboration and innovation. These initiatives can offer long-term benefits and cultural shifts that fundamentally change how government agencies operate.

“Service integration and management (SIAM) is the ability to coordinate service provision across many diverse service partners in an ICT environment,” says Leighton Freene, Kinetic IT’s Group Executive for Federal, Defence and Emergency Services. “In the public sector, there are often multiple, large-scale contracts, or just multiple contracts being delivered side-by-side. The tendency is to consider ‘services’ being only those things that reside within a contract, instead of having an end-to-end view cross-functionally across an organisation.”

“Often, you’ll have multiple service providers and service partners who are delivering different areas of a continuous service line. Having them all coordinated together means you get an optimised outcome, which is one of the biggest benefits of service integration and management,” Leighton says.

The benefits of a long-term service integration and management model are:

• Improved measurement and service quality
• Greater collaboration and co-ordination
• Increased and optimised performance by service providers
• Greater control and visibility of the IT ecosystem

These topline insights were unearthed in the 2023 Global Service Integration and Management (SIAM) Survey, in which more than 200 industry professionals and organisations that are interested in or delivering service integration solutions responded.

The survey was sponsored by Kinetic IT, one of Australia’s trusted and longest-standing service integration providers with proven experience implementing and managing SIAM models in large and complex organisations, including the Australian Department of Defence and Qantas Group.

“Through service integration and management, your agency will be optimised from both a resource and user experience perspective, so the service itself becomes more resilient, reactive to customer feedback and engagement, and as a side effect generally you’ll see cost reductions in the services that are being provided,” Leighton explains.

“With better coordination, the speed at which you respond to incidents increases, the continual service improvement which you’re seeking across the service line increases, and optimisation from services and innovation increases. The more coordination and collaboration you can get across multiple service providers when they’re equally contributing into an ecosystem, the better outcome you get from a user experience perspective.”

However, it’s important to recognise that service integration improvements are staged and take time to realise fully. As the Global SIAM Survey shows, service integration and management transitions when done well take on average 12 to 24 months. This timeframe is the ‘sweet spot’ that allows for in-depth analysis on service provider performance to happen, as well as growing modern practices around iteration and innovation. This approach also has the ripple effect beyond the IT department, impacting the wider agency.

“I can’t think of a situation where service integration wouldn’t be required, regardless of the size and scale of an organisation,” Leighton says. “Because at its heart is coordination across your assets, services, delivering through to your end users. So, I think it’s always going to be necessary.

“My advice to CIOs would be to look at your services and view them end-to-end as a service line, rather than the bits and pieces that you stick in individual service provider contracts.” Leighton says.

This might seem a mammoth task within the public sector where multinational providers operate. But partnering with the right service integration provider with specific onshore capabilities could make all the difference.

“Kinetic IT is an agile, cooperative, and collaborative organisation, enabling more nimble and agile decision-making in coordinating multiple vendors,” Leighton says.

For more information and resources on service integration please visit the 5-Year Global Service Integration and Management Survey, which is a collation of data across the first five years of the survey’s existence for greater insights.

Find out about Kinetic IT’s tailored solutions for government.

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