CEO Insight: Professional Services Enables Government Efficiency

Government spending and efficiency is not only a problem for officials, it’s also an issue we take seriously.  In a hearing from January titled “Wasting Information Technology Dollars: How Can the Federal Government Reform its IT Investment Strategy,” Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa said, “Federal managers say that 47 percent of their budget goes to maintain obsolete and deficient IT resources.” According to Rep. Issa, that’s $20 billion wasted every year. He also claimed that “failure rates and cost overruns still plague between 72 percent and 80 percent of large federal IT programs.”

Our research has shown that many public sector end users have not optimized the products they buy. We have found that many of the feature sets available to them have never been utilized even though they were turned on initially. Some customers don’t realize that an updated version of some software products may actually have additional capabilities that would provide immense value to them. Sadly, our end user research has also shown that some products turn into shelfware and are never used.

Last year, one of our partners, Flexera Software, found that anywhere from 5 to 30 percent of the $8 billion the government spends on software is wasted. The waste, they discovered, was due to audit penalties from non-compliant use, shelfware, deployment inefficiency, and high deployment costs.

The bottom line issue is that government IT managers lack the in-house resources to expertly implement IT software, hardware, and systems. And with more budget cuts on the horizon, that gap will only widen.

Professional Services

Earlier in the year, we expanded our Professional Services offering to help our customers.

Professional Services is a logical extension of the value we provide to our end user customers. We have always had the technical expertise, licensing knowledge, and government-centric application understanding to be a successful product value-added reseller (VAR). By augmenting with pre and post-sale technical and engineering capabilities, we extend the value proposition for our end users so they can install, start-up, and enable the technology products they procure from DLT.

Our services initiative aims to convert shelfware to value-generating software and to ensure that customers are getting the most effective use of the software investment they have made. Our team does this by installing the software correctly, migrating legacy applications effectively, setting up the software to optimize performance, training users, and performing ongoing maintenance to ensure our customer’s investment is operating properly and driving the intended ROI.

We provide targeted technical experts to enhance the products we sell. To do this, our team is divided into four unique teams that compliment and work with one another to offer a complete IT solution.

Pre-Sales Engineering: Our pre-sales experts carry authorizations and technical certifications to ensure that the right products and right feature sets are purchased (and that the products specified will solve the customers’ problem). They assist customers with aligning technologies and new products to the organization’s IT strategy by understanding the environment already in place and advising on strategic next steps.

Program Management: Winning a project is only a small step in the process. The proper execution of the project, attainment of milestones, and collaboration with the stakeholders during the project are keys to success. At DLT, we invested in a program management office to make sure that we delivered on customer expectations and our commitments. To that end, the team successfully worked on 369 proposals and projects last year.

Service Delivery: Our “in-the-field” team of engineering experts makes sure that products are installed properly, tuned for optimal performance, and working well within the unique customer environment, along with complying with the customer policies for security and interfaces. For example, in a recent project, our service team implemented an identify management for a federal agency moving towards FICAM compliance. Our installation of Oracle Directory Services allowed for integrated user certificates at the individual and server level to create an enterprise wide personal identity verification system without re-architecting the entire enterprise.

Service Center: This 7x24x365, award-winning technical support capability allows government end users to speak with a technical support engineer at any time, and be confident that the engineering support is delivered by a well-qualified and properly credentialed US-citizen on US-soil. And with a 98% successful case closure rate, the 945 government customers who opened cases in 2012 can attest to the responsive and top-notch support.

A True Value-Added Solution

Together, the team provides holistic solutions during the entire software and hardware cycles. By utilizing them, agencies will ensure the products they purchase compliment their current environments, their solutions are managed efficiently and on policy, the software and hardware is installed properly, and they are fully supported anytime they need expertise.

Additionally, our Professional Services team is supported by our close partnerships with the brands we represent. DLT is a NetApp Authorized Service Partner (ASP), NetApp CSP Partner – Professional Services Partner, Quantum First-Call Partner, Google Premier Partner, Symantec Technical Support Partner, Oracle Platinum Partner, Red Hat Advanced Business Partner & Public Sector Specialist, and member of the Amazon Web Services Partner Network.

The public sector will always struggle to compete with commercial companies for talent. By making our Professional Services team available, we’ll ensure they have experts available to them at each stage of the IT procurement cycle, reducing inefficiencies and increasing the value of technology procured from DLT.