The Service Executive Model

by Major General Rich Spencer,

The Service Executive Model (SEM) is an exciting change that is underway now. The model will impact every aspect of our digital acquisition and is intertwined with other digital transformational activity that will ensure the digital function can meet the increased pace required to deliver and maintain our conventional and digital deterrence.

This brief introduction will only introduce SEM, its benefits and the ambition. Whether you are a sponsor, consumer, provider or manufacturer of digital capability, General Richard’s article is relevant, so please consider the full article and get involved.

SEM seeks to align with delivery models already used by partners across government, allies and many partners in industry. As the innate value gained from a focus on delivering services is increasingly understood, the proliferation of service orientated organisations will only accelerate. This shift is also aligned with wider UK Government Strategy that seeks to ‘develop services that just work for the user’. For defence, the SEM strategy, published in 2021, sought to deliver the benefits through a shift from a siloed approach to delivery, best suited to industrial age major change projects, to a model that can sustain fast-paced continual digital service improvement. As implementation has continued, the benefits have been expanded and opportunities to capture greater value have been seized.

Part of the journey of orientating an organisation to become service focused has involved the delamination of enduring projects and programmes to their base components. Thereafter, Defence Digital has grouped the complexity of services using the following categories:

• User Facing Services – services that a user or customer could request via a catalogue.

• Supporting Digital Services – these form an integrated part of the user facing services but may be hidden from a user or tertiary to the main service (examples include the network, crypto, storage or services such as the service desk or service management).

Link to full article in PDF.