Using cross-functional services to reduce complexity of multi-source environments
This can spell greater risk for an organisation, lead to higher costs and result in lower satisfaction with IT performance, especially at a time when companies are looking to move to the cloud, prompted by the global pandemic.
While cloud computing provides a compelling value proposition for enterprises to shift their current workloads off-premise, cloud computing can cause various technical and business challenges, such as licensing and compliance with governance requirements, creating a potential risk to the company and its data.
Further adding to the challenge, as industry trends shifted to multi-sourcing in recent years, enterprises have found it difficult to manage multiple suppliers of services and integrating them to provide a single business-facing IT organisation.
This is where cross-functional IT management services become beneficial. Cross-functional services – more commonly known as Service Integration and Management (Siam) – is an approach for managing services sourced from multiple service providers on behalf of a customer.
Important role
These services aim to seamlessly integrate interdependent services from various internal and external service providers into end-to-end services that meet business requirements. This gave rise to the requirement for a company that could manage multiple suppliers whilst identifying issues and opportunities that would otherwise be missed by a single provider.
The service integration and management discipline go hand-in-hand with the standard industry practice, governed by ISO 20001 and the Cobit control framework. It is an add-on to the already well-established Information Technology Infrastructure Library (Itil) frameworks and was established about three years ago.
Cross-functional services provide governance management, integration of processes and technology, as well as assurance and coordination to ensure that the customer organisation receives maximum value from its service providers.
When considering cloud migration, organisations must keep in mind that ITIL processes – a set of best practices for delivering efficient IT support services – do not change when moving to the cloud but are expanded to ensure better integration.
When provisioning from a cloud management platform, cross-functional services enable the various service providers to use different cloud technologies to access the platform and link from it to the different cloud systems they use to provide services.
This provisioning process is a typical change and release management process that is already well established, based on predefined change management models that have more automation built into the processes to make them faster.
Single view
Cross-functional services also provide management tools to companies that will give them an overview of their business processes and how services are performing. Typically, this tool is a business intelligence portal that ingests data from various sources. This data is then manipulated to show a single live dashboard to the customer, illustrating how services are performing according to Key Performance Indicator’s (KPIs) or required criteria.
The role of cross-functional services becomes especially crucial when considering the pitfalls of non-compliance to governance standards. Without governance, integrating services with processes and controls will not be possible. This will lead to non-standard execution, and unmonitored and unmanaged technology areas in the ecosystem, which will be prone to security risks, as well as a host of other potential issues.
Governing the entire IT ecosystem is important and therefore building a governance framework to integrate all processes and services is part of the ecosystem provisioned by cross-functional services. However, companies will experience a transition which will impact the way they work but this impact will mainly be experienced in terms of stricter controls, better governance and better outcomes of services provided. Cross-functional services can assist to ease this impact.
Modern technology companies should leave the management of multiple IT service providers to the experts, allowing them to rather focus on increasing agility, enhancing customer service and developing new and existing solutions. Engaging with a cross-functional service provider can ease many of the challenges that hinder these goals whilst delivering additional value.
About Alta Van Der Linde
Alta Van Der Linde is head of IT governance and service management at T-Systems South Africa.
