Dennis Mbuvi discusses shared services with Tim Hirsch, a consultant with Cisco Advisory Services (CAS) and Shahab Meshki, Cisco East Africa General Manager. CAS works with customers in the enterprise sector, service provider and business strategy, particularly around implementation of technology, operationalising technology and business models that customers should use to lower their costs or increase their revenue opportunities.

A shared service from a technical stand point means taking a technical platform and having multiple ministries share the same platform instead of several. A single network may be shared rather than multiple networks for all ministries.

An operating model allows sharing of services efficiently. Lack of an operating model to do this means that any of the financial, efficiency and business transformational benefits are not realized.

The definition of shared services depends on who you are as a consumer of shared services. “For the government, we may have multiple government organisations, entities or ministries that are using services in the telecommunication world, many which are moving towards IT. We may have multiple government ministries all managing a service independently, procuring them from different providers and managing them independently. For example a telephone service. This can be from a business standpoint, from an operational standpoint or from a technical standpoint,” says Hirsch.

Convergence benefits result in saving of money from sharing services and less replication costs. Efficiency benefits means that people using the services are able to work better. Business transformation benefits means that we are able to do new things that we were not able to do in the past. Business transformation can be realised from services such as unified communications which offer more capabilities than traditional communication systems.

Other business transformations benefits may include a single instead of multiple invoices. Efficiency benefits may be realised from a product like a government call centre that enables handling of business more quickly. Business transformation may include offering new services to citizens to improve their lives, which is the objective of the government.

To implement a shared service, Tim says that one has to begin with defining an operating model on how they will do it. “The technical model is not as complicated as the operating model is,” says Hirsch. In identifying the people, and the organizational requirements for managing services for multiple organizations, one has to define and implement standard operating procedures for doing this and a set of tools such as software used to provision services, tracks its performance. This makes implementation of shared services easier.

Cisco is currently implementing shared services for a Middle Eastern government. The government has a Ministry of ICT which is responsible for delivering ICT services to other ministries. The ICT ministry has drawn its personnel from the private sector and the incumbent service provider. The ministry has then put up an operating structure to become a sort of a government service provider. The government is currently building a technology infrastructure with the help of Cisco.

The next step will be to identify all the services being used by all the government ministries. “The most important things is that they then will need to make a business case for having those other ministries agree to migrate their services over from self management to this government service provider,” says Hirsch. He explains that it is usually a difficult step as in most governments, some ministries tend to be powerful, “You do not just walk in to the ministry of defence and the ministry agrees to hand in the management of their data center.”

To set up the government service provider can choose from 3 different models. In the ‘Do-it-yourself’ model, the government hires the people, purchases the tools and network to become a self funded and self managed provider.
The second model is the outsourcing model where all the components are outsourced to third parties. They hire out help desks, engineering, and network operation center.

The third model, virtual service provider model, is one where a separate legal entity is established. The government service provider, in this case the ministry of ICT, takes an investment role or a board level kind of role. They have control over a separate legal entity, corporate type control where they do not control everything. Some of the components are outsourced while others are done within.

Shahab Meshki, Cisco East Africa General Manager says that there are not many examples of who have done shared services. From a technical standpoint, this is applicable for companies with more than 5,000 employees. The Kenyan government has a strategy place and has already built a government common core network (GCCN). “From a technological point of view, they are already doing it, operationally is also in but in terms of business transformation is the next level the government is going to take,” says Shahab. Governments are primarily the biggest beneficiary of shared services. “On a general note, this is still a new concept and Kenya is taking a leading role, which is very commendable,” he adds.

NetApp: Business tips on shared services
Cloud computing enables IT departments to overcome the short comings of traditional environments – built and optimized to run specific applications, delivering poor server and storage utilization (on average, 10-15% utilization for servers and 30-40% for storage).

Once the IT infrastructure is virtualised, firms have the foundation of a shared IT infrastructure of pooled computer, network, and storage resources to delivery capacity on demand and meet fluctuations in resource requirements.

The improved ability to scale infrastructure up or down to meet dynamically changing and new business needs increases business ability while shared IT infrastructure not only reduces hardware acquisition costs but also results in significant savings in IT staffing costs and data center space, power, and cooling.
Increased efficiency results from standardisation, better resource allocation and utilisation, simplified and automated provisioning processes, and overall operational efficiency improvements in the automation of all aspects of IT management.

In a recent IDC survey of IT decision makers, 44% of respondents indicated that they were considering implementing a private cloud, a cloud deployment contained within the corporate firewall to meet the needs of internal customers.

NetApp has been helping companies evolve to private cloud infrastructure since before the term cloud became popularized. NetApp private cloud solutions are based on its industry-leading data and storage management technology.

The main forces driving organizations to implement private clouds are requirements to increase business agility, reduce costs, and improve efficiencies.
Business agility results from an improved ability to elastically scale infrastructure up or down to meet dynamically changing and new business needs. Slashing the time to provision a system and activate a new application from weeks to days, hours, or even minutes can accelerate application development and test— improving quality and time to market—and can also have a dramatic effect on your business’s ability to innovate.

Costs can be reduced by leveraging a virtualised, shared IT infrastructure. This not only reduces hardware acquisition costs but also results in significant savings in IT staffing costs and data center space, power, and cooling.

Efficiency improvements result from standardisation, better resource allocation and utilisation, simplified and automated provisioning processes, and overall operational efficiency improvements in the automation of all aspects of IT management.