Decoding Today’s Managed Services

Twenty-five years ago when the concept of managed services was emerging, leveraging a service provider was considered a quick and easy way to escape the day-to-day of IT management. Since then, it’s evolved to focus on outcomes while providing predictable, and often lower, costs.

Modern managed services enables organizations to perform better, from something as simple as printing to as complex as cybersecurity operations or as essential as mission delivery. This was the topic of a recent discussion I had with Federal News Network.

At its core, a managed service is really all about outcomes. What an agency is paying for is that outcome, enabling the organization to achieve cost efficiencies, improve operations, realize value and free themselves up to focus on their mission.

The journey to managed services can be either transformational or transitional.

• Transformational managed services is where you take a service, and you adopt it very quickly, “transforming” into this managed service delivery model. GDIT’s work with the Department of Veterans Affairs is an example of this, where we consolidated 12 disparate help desks into a unified Service Desk.
• On the other hand, the transitional approach moves the agency more incrementally, examining each type of service in a more measured manner. As an example, GDIT is currently using that model with NASA Shared Services Center, where 60 separate services are in the queue.

Innovation is often a driving force for agencies to adopt managed services, particularly because these government agencies can struggle with this investment. Because the main goal of a well-designed managed service is to deliver to the agency’s outcomes, it enables the transfer of risk for innovation and delivery to the provider.

These outcomes serve as the foundation to our delivery. That’s why one of the big things we really focus on with our customers is developing clear and outcomes-based service level agreements, which in turn facilitate transparency with delivery overall.

Learn more about Managed Services at GDIT.