Government Department Plans For Unified Approach To Service Integration

Government outlines plans for a move to the unified approach for SIAM services According to a recent publication, all government departments are going to be required to use a strategic reference for Service Integration and Management (SIAM) systems.

The plans, which have been developed by the Government Procurement Service (GPS), aim to unify SIAM services throughout the public sector. Part of new GPS frameworks According to TechMarketView this strategy will form part of a new collection of GPS frameworks that have been developed to support the government’s new ICT Strategy.

Information Notice
An information notice has detailed the potential framework to all of the interested suppliers. The aim of the framework is to move the government towards multisource tower services. These disaggregated services will encompass areas including networks and telecoms, delivery and support, application development, hosting and desktop services.

The system to operate service towers In order for the system to operate ‘Towers’ will be established so that an office of central government is able to provide several unified services across the entire establishment.

This system will allow these services to be provided by several suppliers, but they can be managed centrally. A recent example of this type of system was launched by the Post Office. This £360 million framework utilizes the ‘service towers’ approach to deliver IT services to the whole organization.

First procurement framework This SIAM framework, which has been drawn up by GPS, will be the first to use the ‘Cross Government Strategic SIAM reference set’. The departments involved include; the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Work and Pensions, and the Department of Health.

It is hoped that this initiative will develop a unified approach to SIAM across the public sector. The SIAM framework has been divided into nine separate sections.

These include core SIAM, IT information security support, service desk, service assurance, planning and support for service transition, service knowledge management, validation & testing, transformation design and change services and full SIAM service.

Still Able To Procure Outside The Framework TechMarketView Director Explains In reference to the project director at TechMarketView, Tola Sargent stated that the departments with complex and large SIAM requirements would still be able to procure services outside of the SIAM framework.

They would, however, still be required to use the strategic SIAM reference set as all other departments. Sargent explained that lots of suppliers will be interested in roles within the SIAM system.

They include the traditional IT services suppliers, which have confidence in service management and understand the towers (provided they can assure themselves that the risk-reward profile is appropriate), other service companies with a strong service management history (such as the defense contractors), the management consultancies (although they may need to partner with systems management tool providers), and SMEs.

For anyone who is interested in finding out more about the SIAM framework, there is an upcoming industry day in October which will provide much more details for all of the suppliers concerned.

This was a guest blog post by Freddy. Freddy reports on news and events within the UK public eCommerce sector. Procserve is a leading Government Procurement solutions provider. Check out the link for more information on government procurement.