Software Services and Strategy

As I spend more time with our #federal delivery teams, I am starting to get a feel of how a typical federal CIO’s #softwareservices org is set up. As I thought more about it, it motivated me to draw this picture of how a services org could be setup. It really comes down to answering the question “What kind of services business are you in?”

• Construction Services?
• Federation Services?
• Contribution Services?

Let me explain each of these businesses a little more – Construction Services business –

• You help a customer.
• This is the 1:1 business model.
• This is your typical software shop where the customer tells you what to build and you build it for them. Every time they need to change any part of it, they will come back to you.
• They are totally dependent upon you for this service.
• The service you built is only good for them and nobody else. Other customers will need to put a request for you to take on their Construction project.

Federation Services business –

• You help a customer help themselves.
• This is the 1:Many business model.
• Federation business is where you build the service in such a way that it enables and empowers the customer to make their own customizations and run it on their own time.
• More importantly, this type of business also empowers other similar customers to use this federated service rather than making a special request for another Construction project.

Contribution Services business –

• You help a customer help other like customers.
• This is the Many:Many business model.
• Contribution business is where you empower your customers to do their own Construction projects and often, contribute it back for others to use it as well.
• Of course, the business model comes with guardrails like tools, standards, guidelines, SLAs, etc. so that the contributed service meets/exceeds certain expectations.

The services strategy visual above can also be thought of as a Maturity Model where an organization would aspire to move from doing pure Construction work to enabling Contribution work. Question for you: What services business are you in? What kind of ideas does this provoke/inspire for your context or org? #federalgovernment #cloudmigration #productstrategy #digitaltransformation #softwarearchitecture #technologyservices #enterprisearchitecture #federalcontracting