6th July 2021
Application Managed Services Director, Kevin Robinson, discusses IT application service challenges faced by local and national public service organisations and how to get more out of existing systems without the need to waste precious resources replacing them.
The past two years have been a challenge, and across public services, there is intense scrutiny on operational budgets. For those managing public serving applications, getting more out of your existing systems is attractive, when replacing with new may not be practical or affordable. The question is, how can you take what you have and start adopting new ways to make your existing services work for now, and for the future?
There has never been a better time than now. Start by considering two key questions:
- Are there immediate opportunities to help reduce your technical debt?
- How can you make your existing investments deliver for you in today’s rapidly changing environment?
We help organisations tackle these questions, addressing the challenges of improving digital services for citizens without breaking the bank. Whether you are looking for operational efficiencies in how you host and move to the cloud, looking to embrace mobile-ready services without replacing your entire system, or integrating more of your front-end services into the Government web framework, you need to look at where your gaps are and identify any quick wins.
The big bang approach of moving applications to an Everything as a Service (XaaS) platform may be tempting and help your organisation to add extra features, offerings or insights. But what if you were able to enhance your current system to support additional features and get further benefit from investment made already in the bespoke systems you have? The gap between what you have and what you need might be closer than you think.
How to optimise software while maintaining services
IT projects and environments can be vastly different; each requiring a unique management approach. We know councils across the UK manage hundreds of applications. We’ve seen this increase since the start of 2020, with greater demand for new services and applications to support them. As a result, councils can find themselves struggling with sufficient time to critically review their technology landscape and refine, develop or integrate applications without affecting services. One way to start exploring your applications and improve services would be to have an agnostic Rapid Review which assesses entire application environments to ensure services are robust, and accessible against WCAG compliance, and lift some pressure on budgets.
We’ve also worked with over 50 government and justice departments as a managed service partner to advise on how they can make small investments in the right place, that ultimately save time and money. While budgets are tight and with a managed approach, take advantage of upgrades, integrations and enhancements at a fraction of the cost of replacing an entire system from scratch.
To find out more about Civica’s Managed Services and how to extend the life of your current systems: