No IT professional can afford to ignore SIAM…

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No IT professional can afford to ignore SIAM

Do you want your business to be highly agile and responsive?

SIAM (Service Integration and Management) provides the basis to respond more effectively as business demands continue to grow while becoming more complex.

 Have you heard of SIAM?

Surprisingly I had not heard of SIAM until quite recently, despite working as an ITSM professional for nearly 30 years.  Service Integration and Management (SIAM) does make a lot a sense once you understand what it is and the benefits.  I’m sure that anyone working in the ITSM space will soon be familiar with SIAM.  Personally, I cannot see how anyone serious about delivering outstanding customer service whilst optimising costs cannot be interested in what SIAM has to offer.

Are you tired of operational risk getting in the way of running your business?

A SIAM model gives organisations the opportunity to spread operational risk across multiple service providers, as opposed to relying upon a single service provider.

Do you feel like IT are always accountable for everything?

The scope of SIAM contracts allows for greater transparency and clarity of the services being provided, allowing IT organisations to hold service providers accountable for their element of the end-to-end service chain.

How can SIAM help your Organisation?

In short, SIAM helps both internal and external service providers work better more effectively together presenting multi sourcing of services as a single service to customers.

 

In a world where multi-vendor relationships are becoming the norm, having a framework that is an adoption of ITIL that gels relationships together in a more cohesive fashion sounds like a reasonable idea.

How should you think of SIAM?

SIAM does not replace ITIL, think of it as an adoption or even a joining of ITIL processes across all your service providers whether internal or external.

SIAM Component Model

What are some of the SIAM investment objectives?

Here is a flavour of some SIAM investment objectives that have been borne out of the increased complexity of the IT value chain and rise of multi-vendor supplier eco-system:

  • Improve the quality of all services
  • Provide best value for money for the management and delivery of all services
  • Avoid “lock-in” to any one supplier
  • Establish a capability and capacity to support the successful introduction of new services and vendors
  • Enable multiple providers to integrate and deliver end to end services that exceed expectation
  • Ensure flexibility and scalability

What can SIAM deliver?

Mapping business services does not have to be IT centric, as SIAM can bridge practically any service, irrespective of whether they are provided by internal or external vendors and then applying an SLA framework across the landscape provides very useful insight.  You can quickly:

  • Optimise the overall cost and value of providing services to the business
  • Reduce risk
  • Drive economies of scale
  • Improve customer satisfaction
  • Drive forward on consistency and best practice implementing improved governance and controls
  • SINGLE POINT OF OWNERSHIP, visibility and control
  • Clear roles and responsibility
  • Best use of skills
  • Remove duplication
  • Better support of changes and improved responsiveness

Furthermore, you can have non-emotive dialogue with all your service providers and agree how your incident, change and request fulfilment processes can fuse and work in synergy across all your service entities.

What is the best approach for applying SIAM?

Like most things, I would advocate applying the 80/20 rule to ensure you see short term benefits.

  • Be pragmatic in your approach and application
  • List out your key services, those that have the biggest business impact based on performance
  • Speak to your service providers and work collaboratively to agree how you will work together using the SIAM framework supported by ITIL
  • Be clear on responsibilities, who does what and when
  • Have clear SLA’s defined and in place, with clear expectations regularly reviewed
  • Strong effective communication is important in any relationship and SIAM provides a framework to help

What difference would it make if you had ability to access “best-in-class” skills?

By leveraging a SIAM operating model, IT organisations now have greater access to expertise across a wider range of technologies from a broader range of suppliers.

Wouldn’t it be great to have flexibility in your service providers?

SIAM provides the ability for organisations to adopt a more flexible model, whereby service providers can be onboarded/offboarded with greater ease. In practice, organisations prefer a stable environment but, as SIAM contracts mature, this feature will undoubtedly start to be seen more commonly.

Would you like to have the ability to introduce competitive tension for commodity services? 

SIAM provides organisations with the opportunity to allow service providers in the SIAM eco-system to bid for specific projects, based upon their core capabilities. This aspect is most commonly seen in discrete projects with less-complex deliverables, such as application development.

Who owns and develops intellectual property?

SIAM enables organisations to define and own their own data models, processes, procedures, and operating models – supporting the ability to flex onboard and offboard service providers without a loss of specialised knowledge and/or capability. In addition, this ownership allows organisations to easily take control in assessing and improving their operating models.

What tools support SIAM?

My quest to understand SIAM better and the benefits apparent have led me to explore the best and most effective tools available that are SIAM compatible.  What tools have been designed specifically for the SIAM eco-system?  What tools deliver on the value and benefits apparent in today’s complex multi-vendor environments?  I was somewhat surprised at the lack of tooling.  However, appreciate that SIAM is relatively a new concept in the ITSM world.  One such tool that fits the bill is 4me.  I would strongly urge anyone interested in SIAM takes a serious look at the 4me platform.

As my love affair with SIAM is growing stronger every day I see my future journey in exploring SIAM further and becoming a practitioner.

Life, for me, is about helping others and adding value.  Being armed with frameworks such as SIAM feels like a good position to be as cloud environments and thus multi-vendor eco-systems continue to expand.

Hope you enjoyed reading about some of the key whys and what’s of SIAM.

You can find out more in this SIAM whitepaper.

For more information on the 4me platform and SIAM please contact us.  I would very much welcome any opportunity to have a conversation on how the 4me platform and SIAM can help your business.

Categories: SIAM