IT Assist ( the new ICT Shared Service Centre) provides
common infrastructure and desktop services to NICS staff in the office, at home or when mobile working.
This cost-effective means of delivering of ICT services is provided to all Departments within the NICS,
their agencies and, if they so desire. associate non-departmental public bodies. IT Assist operates
to industry best practices, providing optimised levels of service availability and resilience to meet
the needs of all stakeholders.
The Shared Service Centre seeks to provide the NICS with a high quality,
resilient and cost-effective common service provision. Common services are considered to be the ICT
services that underpin all departmental business activity, e.g. help desk, desktop services, infrastructure
etc. The Help Desk also provides a "triage" service for line of business systems and corporate
NICS systems such as Records NI.
The concept of sharing services or consolidating services has taken
off in both the public and private sectors worldwide. Within the UK, the Gershon and Transformational
Strategies set out the Government’s commitment to moving towards a shared services model and the use
of "sharing" to deliver simplification, rationalisation and standardisation is key to the
NICS Modernisation and Reform Agenda.
ICT service provision must:
- Deliver high levels of service consistently, to all users, in
the face of increasing demand from business;
- Deliver ICT services efficiently;
- Provide continuity and security of ICT service delivery;
- Create a sustained capability to exploit complex technology;
- Ensure the viability of line of business ICT support;
- Increase standardisation across NICS;
- Exercise effective ICT service governance and management and
- Maintain appropriate levels of ICT skill availability.
IT Assist is providing common infrastructure and desktop services to
NICS staff in the office, at home or when mobile working. It also provides a cost-effective means of
delivering ICT services to all Departments within the NICS, operating to industry best practices and
providing improved levels of service availability and resilience to meet the needs of all stakeholders.
Moreover, the NICS has already demonstrated that coming together gives us the scale to do things that
no single department would have had the resources to do on its own, for example, our world class data
centres, the introduction of ITIL and the Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft.
IT Assist's Service Desk went live in May 2007 to service the initial
five Departments (DFP, OFMDFM, DRD, DOE and DCAL) in the first phase. DETI joined in Oct 2007, DE came
on board in April 2008 and the
remaining Departments/ Agencies will be brought on board by April 2009.
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