We were engaged as a strategic partner to assist the Department in developing a direction for their cloud service offering.

The introduction of Cloud services has had significant impact and presents large potential opportunities for Government. As a shared service provider for multiple Government agencies, their clients and the wider Government are looking to adopt more modern and maintainable platforms, with a strategic push to adopt contemporary ways of working (e.g. Agile, CI/CD, User Centred Design). The Department required an investigation into the provision of cloud services to its clients, and how these services integrate and present challenges for their current services. MXA were involved in three engagements with the Department to develop Cloud Options, a Cloud Strategy and a Cloud Operating Model.

Cloud Hosting Options
In our first engagement, MXA worked closely with key stakeholders from the Department to understand the current capabilities and processes around their delivery of services. We conducted research of the Department’s documentation and mapped out the operating environment as well as the client base. We developed a series of strategic hosting options for how the department could deliver cloud services, summarised by four models of: Steady state, evolving, value-add or passthrough.

Cloud Strategy
We built upon our intimate knowledge and understanding of the Department during the first engagement to assist in developing a Cloud Strategy that articulated the Departments desired model and cloud strategy moving forward. We developed an understanding of the client base and mapped opportunities, challenges and risks.

Cloud Operating Models

MXA held interviews with key stakeholders from the Department to understand the current capabilities and processes around delivery of services. We then held an executive workshop with Deputy Secretaries and CIOs from the Department of Jobs and their largest clients to discuss the complexities and determine the benefits that the executives were looking to gain from using Cloud services.

This was followed by a comprehensive discovery including workshops and interviews with representatives from all the Departments client segments, following User-centred Design and Design Thinking principles to determine their opportunities and challenges in moving to cloud and how they would like to work with the Department to deliver cloud services.

We also conducted research and held interviews with representatives from cloud service providers and other similar shared service such as Cenitex. We then worked with key stakeholders, both internal and external, to develop several options for the Department’s cloud operating model, including a developing a cost model, RACI and high-level risk assessment for each option.

We provided a shared understanding of the drivers for cloud services from all levels of stakeholders. This included communicating strategic opportunities and technical challenges to both the Department and its Executives.

We presented a paper detailing the opportunities, risks and required investment to provide cloud services into the future with a focus on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. It also included a description of how to implement each operating model with architectural design and a description of how to mitigate technical challenges.

MXA provided the department and its clients with a thoroughly researched, detailed, and shared understand of the challenges and potential benefits in providing cloud services.