This state is about much more than a purchase order. It is a detailed activity to align strategy, policy and standards that needs to take place. Requests for Information, Proposal & Delivery activities can be run in a structured fashion. Supplier selection and on-boarding includes security assessments. Final purchasing can then take place.

Before deployment can commence we guide impact assessment, inform business change management, consider and produce reference designs, high level designs & low-level designs. Design activity goes through assurance and governance reviews. Testing is conducted, and operational readiness is assessed.  

Once a service is live, it is time for the organisation to onboard into service management, monitoring and analytic tools. Baselines are created, and norms established for performance and security. Processes for evergreen, planned maintenance, disaster recovery and business continuity are proved out.

A service which is on its way out needs to first have all data, workloads and users migrated to a new solution. This state involves another pass through impact assessment and business change management. Historical access and archiving needs to be considered from legal, compliance and continuity angles. Any reduction in capability needs to be managed through to evolved Target Operating Models.