The UK Home Office is looking for a vendor capable of delivering "high quality" Service Integration & Management (SIAM) services for a project leading the transformation of Britain's borders.
In a tender published on October 18, it committed to paying up to £25 million for a vendor capable of leading the "running, development, management and reporting" of projects across a scheme called Crossing the Border (CtB).
This programme is an "ecosystem" covering all the products and services that control the flow of people into Britain, including "Primary Control Points" such as positions guarded by Border Force officers as well as e-gates that are "indirectly supervised" by an officer.
The SIAM provider which wins the contract will work collaboratively with the Home Office to "deliver our vision for CtB , management, governance, and assurance across digital delivery in the CtB DDaT (Digital Data and Technology) arena".
The systems that power the UK's perimeter run 24 hours a day and operate 365 days a year, which clearly necessitates the highest levels of resilience and availability. Applications run on "diverse technological stacks" (which inevitably means troublesome legacy systems) and are considered critical national infrastructure because they incorporate official and secret data sets.
All information collected at ports is processed in the cloud and on-premise at airports and other points of entry. Systems are built on top of a number of infrastructure platforms in a hybrid cloud model managed with a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) methodology, which oversees the entire lifecycle of a product through development, manufacturing and deployment all the way to the moment it's scrapped.
At the beginning of this month, the Home Office also revealed plans to spend up to £25 million on "Transition and Transformation Leadership" services during its bid to beef up the border.
What is Service Integration & Management (SIAM)?
The concept of SIAM was first dreamed up by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) in 2005.
"They had previously outsourced delivery of their IT services, and wanted to improve delivery and value for money," explained SIAM specialist Kevin Holland in a blog for Scopism, which describes itself as the "definitive global source of best practice for SIAM".
"The main idea of this transformation to SIAM was to remove duplication of service management activities from the multiple delivery units, by creating a ‘service integration’ layer within the outsourcer, known as a ‘SIAM tower’. This layer would perform many of the day-to-day service management activities for the delivery units but also provide coordination, assurance, and governance.
"The activities of the delivery units were separated and aligned into ‘delivery towers’. Each tower provided a unique type of IT service: hosting, networks, application development and maintenance, application support, and desktop. Each tower was provided under a separate contract with DWP."
While the tower model was effective for government departments in the past, it has become outdated due to evolving technology and development trends like Cloud and DevOps, Hunter added. It creates a service landscape with complex dependencies, increased service provider interactions, and higher workloads for service integrators, leading to more risks and costs.
For this reason, the new SIAM Body of Knowledge from Scopism advises discontinuing its use.
