Apps.gov, a federal government initiative out of the General Services Administration, demonstrates several concepts that have been the dream of many private enterprise IT departments for some time, but have been successfully executed by very few. Here are the five trends that I think Apps.gov demonstrates, and why you should pay attention:
The IT service catalog. For years, business managers--sick of the bureaucracy inherent in most service provisioning processes--have imagined a world in which they could select desired IT services from a catalog and click a button to complete the transaction. This Amazon-like service acquisition experience has many appealing advantages over process-heavy provisioning processes.
For one thing, it demonstrates the power of applying superior consumer Web experiences to traditionally human IT processes. However, it also enables--heck, encourages--agencies to explore and validate the cost savings that are purported to be inherent in cloud computing.
This should be great news to IT service catalog vendors like NewScale and the like. When CEOs see the App.gov interface--rightly or wrongly--many will wonder why they can't give their organization the same experience.
Core categories of service from an end user's perspective. One of the things that greatly simplifies the home page for Apps.gov is the simple four-category breakdown of cloud service offerings. This makes it much less intimidating for users to go exploring to see what they can find and gives vendors an opportunity to consider how to best position their offerings.
What the categories are is "Business Apps", "Produtivity Apps", "Cloud IT Services," and "Social Media Apps."
What they aren't is "SaaS," "PaaS," and "IaaS" (the so-called "SPI" model). While the latter categorizations helps technologists classify the types and audiences of various cloud services, they mean nothing to most end users of those services (especially SaaS services).
I will be the first to admit that categorization of anything as complex as the IT market is difficult, if not impossible. But my initial experience with this site tells me these groupings aren't too bad. I would expect to hear more IT organizations and vendors talking about service delivery in these terms instead of the SPI model.
via news.cnet.com
Apps.gov is a horrible implementation of a service catalog and there's no evidence that making a purchase from the site will provision anything. I say it's horrible because most of the offerings do not describe what you're getting for your money. Example, this is the description of one product: "Google Message Discovery Service Monthly Charges: w/SILVER Support Service w/1 yr Retention $/Acct/Month". What am I getting? What is "Silver Support"? What are the requirements? What are the limits? Who can order? I had to go to Google's site and search to find out what this is. I seriously doubt that making a purchase from the site provisions anything. I expect it sends an order to the vendor who then contacts the purchasing organization to arrange to provision the service. From my perspective Apps.gov is nothing more than any other web site that sells something. Selling online does not make it a service catalog.
Posted by: David Lee | Friday, September 18, 2009 at 02:08 PM