How CACI enabled strategic IT management for a central government department

BACKGROUND

Our customer, a central government department, operates with a diverse and complex array of technology solutions consisting of hundreds of systems, applications, and services that support its operations.

The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) identified a significant gap in management information regarding IT and its alignment with broader business objectives. This gap has hindered the leadership team’s ability to make informed strategic and investment decisions.

IT services are provided by commercial suppliers, other government departments, and internal development teams, often leading to disparate data, duplication, technical debt and therefore waste.

The department has a strategy to drive change and ensure operational effectiveness and efficiency for the benefit of taxpayers. The CTO is responsible for the day-to-day operations of IT and makes decisions on investments to innovate, grow, maintain, and retire systems within the IT estate, ensuring alignment with the departmental strategy.

THE CHALLENGE

The CTO faced challenges in driving this strategy due to a lack of knowledge about the state and interdependencies of systems within the IT estate, making it difficult to make evidence-based investment decisions. The necessary information was not readily available often leading to lengthy, one-off investigations to surface the data required.

To address this issue, the CTO initiated the establishment of Enterprise, Business, and Solution Architecture practices. These practices will create architectures, to be stored in a single repository, providing a cohesive link from strategy through business and applications, to the underlying technology.

A key requirement for the architecture was that it should be a live digital resource, actively used and maintained by a wide community across the organisation. If this is not achieved, the architecture is at risk of becoming outdated and unable to provide the answers it was designed to address.

THE SOLUTION

CACI was engaged to scope and define the architecture to be captured and provide assurance that it would be sustainable and fit for purpose. CACI collaborated with the customer to agree the activities required to achieve the goal:

• Defining a meta-model that can capture the architecture that will answer these questions, such as which business capabilities would be affected by the degradation or loss of an IT System.
• Discovering the questions the architecture needed to answer. This activity augmented findings from earlier work, as well as further consultation with stakeholders.
• Estimating the volume of elements and relationships within the model and the amount of effort to maintain it.
• Demonstrate that the meta-model is sufficient to accommodate and assist with an inflight initiative (Move to Product) to reorganise management of IT around Products, e.g. progress on understanding product and system life cycle and interdependencies.
• Demonstrate that, when populated, the architecture repository will support other initiatives, such as (Move to Cloud) migrating IT from on-premises into cloud services, therefore future-proofing the practice.

THE RESULTS

The project produced the following results:

• CACI has helped the department achieve a sufficient level of maturity in its architecture practices, along with artefacts and skills, to continue the journey to a fully mature capability.
• The department is re-using and building on the architecture captured to date to continually monitor progress and alignment with strategic goals.
• The artefacts generated by the Move to Product initiative are being used to populate the repository to relate IT through a base lined Business Capability Model (BCM) to value and strategic goals.
• This in turn is being integrated with other corporate data sources to produce dashboards for decision making at board meetings.

THE FUTURE

The department has adopted the solution and, unaided, its architects are now populating the repository. Having started small there is now an appetite to extend the reach of the architecture captured, to cover other aspects of concern to the CTO, e.g. security and information flows. CACI is aiming to assist the department achieve these goals through several targeted assignments over the next financial year.

Download this customer case study here.