This client is a large law enforcement organization based in Europe, with tens of thousands of personnel working across a varied range of departments.
This organization has been a Livingstone Group client for over five years. Livingstone was first engaged by the customer shortly after the organization underwent a major IT transition to a SIAM (Service Integration and Management) model for all its IT services. The organization has massively varied IT requirements across its departments and had multiple service providers catering to everything from data centers through to business applications. With this complicated IT landscape to contend with, Livingstone was brought on board by the team responsible for the SIAM delivery to help the organization attain greater visibility and control over its licensing and IT assets.
At the time, the organization was also undergoing a major digitalization transformation program in how it delivered and operated its front-line services, so it was particularly crucial that it had a cost-effective and optimized ITAM (IT Asset Management) strategy in place.
Operations coordination & IT asset visibility
A dedicated team of Livingstone’s industry and licensing experts were assigned to this client. This team’s first task was to assess the licensing risk and optimization of mission critical software assets across key areas of the organization. It was crucial that the organization possessed total insight across all these assets for it to move ahead with its strategic programs, not only to help it better align contracts for future operations, but to also ensure they could be optimized for strategic digital transformation projects.
One challenge Livingstone’s team found during this process was that the organization was struggling to gain commercial visibility of its IT assets, and that it didn’t have a clear overview or understanding of all contracts both direct and through other areas of the organization. This problem was, in part, because there were numerous budget holders buying software that was specific to their department’s operational needs and were negotiating individual contracts without proper category insight and sourcing expertise. As a result, contracts did not always deliver best value for each department’s usage, nor were they agile enough to support changing requirements.
Livingstone set about helping the SIAM team and all other relevant stakeholders from within the organization to fully understand their IT asset base, from major contracts to individual licenses. The team also focused on understanding what impact the wider digital transformation program would have on the organization’s IT infrastructure, from end-user rights all the way up to the client’s data centers. It was important that the organization understood what contracts it had in place to support this transformation, whether compliance and regulatory requirements were being met by governance strategies, and where contracts needed to be renegotiated to fully support the new digital operations.
Analyzing & providing a managed service
Over the course of several months, Livingstone undertook a full analysis of the key software vendors that, together, delivered 70% of operational capabilities to the organization. The experts from Livingstone produced a significant amount of consumption and forward modelling data that allowed Bills of Material to be optimized and contracts to be better negotiated, aligning stakeholders from across every department. This unified view of software and IT requirements also highlighted where contractual, licensing and governance changes were needed to better maintain control of contracts and expenditure into the future.
A managed service from Livingstone’s team was put in place to provide licensing expertise and support to help the organization optimize the licensing aspects of the digital transformation process. These managed services were offered and available to the organization as a whole to support both operations and users.
Livingstone also worked alongside senior IT and digital transformation leadership at the organization, keeping them informed and included throughout the entire optimization process. This senior level sponsorship, particularly in the public sector, is a key part of Livingstone’s optimization process as it enables the organization as a whole to see the benefits of a systematic ITAM strategy.
Optimized digital transformation lead to significant savings
Livingstone helped the organization’s procurement team optimize and renegotiate contracts with major vendors as several contracts needed to be restructured, realigned and optimized to help meet the objectives on the wider digital transformation project. Livingstone’s experts reduced vendor support costs massively and successfully defended several audits. The organization saw millions of dollars in savings (25-30%), in addition to the 30% preferential public sector discount already applied, meaning Livingstone’s contribution delivered massive additional cost-savings to the client.
In addition, Livingstone helped put together a shared category management strategy to better support the organization across every department, providing sourcing support and expertise for all stakeholders.
Looking forward, Livingstone will look to continue working alongside the organization as it continues to develop its digital and operational strategies. Livingstone proposes to establish an optimized ITAM framework for the organization so that it can continue running optimally from an IT standpoint on an ongoing basis.