Cost optimization pillar - Government Lens
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Cost optimization pillar

The cost optimization pillar includes the ability to run services which deliver policy intent and user outcome at the best value. 

The following question and best practices are designed to complement the best practices in the Cost Optimization Pillar whitepaper.

GL-COST-01: How do you demonstrate an understanding of “value for money” in the customer’s context?

Most government entities have clear rules around how they assess value for money, but this can be subtly different across jurisdictions. For some countries, value for money is considered whatever is the best functionality for the cost to deliver the desired policy outcome. Other countries take into account the best balance of social, public, and environmental benefits along with cost.

These procurement rules translate to how cost optimization is perceived, with broader analysis of the public value or policy realization sometimes considered as pure cost efficiencies. For this reason, running services at the lowest price point to deliver policy outcomes may or may not be considered cost optimization for the government department, although it's still a generally useful goal.

The following is a list of considerations and good practices to explore with the customer and to document to make sure that value for money is achieved in a government context.

  • Document the definition of value for money for the jurisdictional and portfolio context, and how this service meets that definition.

    • Improvement plan – Engage with the government organization to understand and document their value for money definition. Work with your AWS account team to optimise costs. If you're on AWS Enterprise Support, your Technical Account Manager (TAM) can help with this. The AWS Tools for Reporting and Cost Optimization whitepaper can provide guidance.

  • Define how the cost and value is reported to oversight and governance bodies (for example, parliament, and public scrutiny).

    • Improvement plan – Encourage the organization to automate and provide ease of cost/value reporting for the service. AWS provides several reporting and cost-optimization tools, including AWS Cost Explorer Service, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost and Usage Report. Serverless applications running on services like AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB can help by providing insight into costs per event.

  • Build in-house capability manage costs through training, tools, and equipping teams.

    • Improvement plan – Provide delivery teams with the services and tools that they need to be able to actively understand and manage their costs.

  • Leverage existing solutions and capabilities where possible. Support the reuse of platforms, panels, marketplaces, research, design systems, and existing solutions or components where possible.

    • Improvement plan – Encourage the organization to identify and leverage reusable tools, solutions, research and methods for the service. See the AWS Solutions Library.

  • Leverage professional networks and user groups. Identify and engage with cross-governmental networks, professional networks and relevant user groups to engage peer review and feedback on the solution.

    • Improvement plan – Encourage the organization to identify and leverage networks and communities of practice, and establish peer review sessions.

  • Optimize for speed of change..  It’s sometimes necessary to optimize for speed to respond to a citizen need or department mandate rapidly. Government solutions might need to initially overcompensate on capacity to maintain service reliability during peak popularity, for example, at the time of a press release, to avoid breaking citizen trust. Fortunately, this necessary choice is temporary and works well with cloud economics. Service delivery teams can cost optimize and consider automatic scaling after release events, when utilization and popularity have normalized.

    • Improvement plan – Provide guidance and support on automated resource optimization.

  • Optimize for budget planning processes in the jurisdiction. Provide decision makers with the key metrics that they need to balance citizen needs with service costs. Support the organization to take into account funding cycles and ensure continuity of service. Often, there is low flexibility in these cycles, however, government customers can be supported to build more flexibility into the program, project, or product-based funding mechanisms.

    • Improvement plan – Encourage the organization to automate and provide ease of cost/value reporting for the service, especially for delivery teams and decision makers.

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