Agency Relationship Management

ARM Overview

Agency Relationship Management staff members focus primarily on customer service via Agency Relationship Managers assigned to and co‐located with state departments and offices serviced by the Office of Technology Services.

The ARMs facilitate relationships between the OTS operational units and its partner agencies through strategic planning, communications, an in‐depth understanding of both the  agencies’ business objectives and OTS’ service offerings and capabilities and a thorough awareness of the partner agencies' portfolio of information technology systems.

ARM Key Functions

• Supports service strategy
  • Identifies stakeholders and specify strategic requirements and funding to provide business case for potential opportunities to the IT organization
• Facilitates service design
  • Validates customer requirements and ensures customer involvement in design activities
  • Coordinates service transition
  • Coordinates customer involvement in service transition processes and ensures validation of release schedules
  • Plans, directs and coordinates the development and distribution of informational material about IT services to agencies
  • Communicates the scope, performance metrics, objectives, cost and roles and responsibilities of services to end use
• Supports service operations
  • Maintains the business relationships between Central IT and the departments to enable better linkage between IT as a service provider and the customer at the strategic and tactical levels
  • Provides the key point of contact for agencies to provide direct support for agency IT operations
  • Communicates scheduled outages, updates on major incidents
  • Drives continuous service improvement
  • Develops, negotiates, maintains and monitors shared service level agreements with agencies
  • Reports service performance, facilitates reviews on ability to meet strategic objectives and initiates service improvement plans
  • Evaluates and responds to customer satisfaction through service reviews, customer feedback and service-level monitoring
• Business Analysis
  • Pooled group of resources that will be dispatched to different projects on a requested basis
  • Provides business and IT analysis in support of project conception, initiation and completion
  • Supports requirements gathering from departments, development of customer solutions
  • Supports alignment between business and IT and with enterprise IT standards
  • Identifies changes to the customer environment that potentially could impact the type, level or utilization of services provided
  • Helps to prepare business case for change drivers and transformational change