For a significant time now we are seeing
that businesses no longer depend on one IT service provider. There has been a
shift whereby business relied on multiple service providers and in many cases
there has been more than five IT service providers catering to a single
business. Businesses reaped the benefits in terms of cost but what was
overlooked was the complexity that would arise in managing multiple suppliers.
The benefits were eventually offset by the complexity. This was a time when
service integration as a concept evolved. Service providers started pitching
themselves as service integrators.
As a result of the complexity in managing
multiple suppliers, last couple of years has seen another shift whereby the
businesses have started focusing on vendor consolidation and restricting the
number of suppliers they engage with.
Gradually businesses have put forth a strategy whereby one of the
suppliers is selected as lead supplier and are given an additional
responsibility to manage other suppliers which is predominantly from
operational perspective.
During this time concepts called Service
Management Integration (SMI) and Multi-supplier Integration (MSI) evolved.
Majority of leading service providers or service integrators have created their
own approach or model around SMI.
Also, during 2012 OGC felt the need to have
a framework or approach around service integration and management of service
providers. They named this approach as Service Integration and Management
(SIAM). Also, a work group was constituted to create and detail SIAM. This
working group had come out with their initial work but before the concept could
have seen the light-of-the-day Axelos was created (decision on formation of
Axelos was taken in mid-2013). I do not have any information regarding what
happened to the investments and work of the working group.
This also resulted in number of SIAM models
or approaches coming to the market led by Accenture, IBM, TCS, Capgemini and
Atos. Off-late other service providers like HP, Wipro, etc. have also been
pitching-in.
Since the conception of the SIAM working
group by OGC, I had been following the developments and doing my own research
towards what business challenges are and what should be covered as part of
SIAM. I have been working along with one of friends, another ITSM expert,
Rakesh to create our own SIAM model. This model is based on our extensive
research in this area. We are calling this model as SIAM Fluid-Pump model
inspired by the mechanical concepts (Though we are not mechanical engineers J) we learnt during our engineering
days.
Market already had SMI (MSI as an approach
did not really convert into a model or approach adopted or named by IT service
providers) and various service providers including Capgemini has their models
named after SMI. Then, why do we need SIAM and SMI. Are these two approaches same? Additionally
number of organizations and service providers has Service Management Office
(SMO) responsible for managing service management processes with some of the
activities spanning across all the IT service providers for a customer. This
threw up another question for us - How is SMO different?
These questions had troubled us a lot. We
got our answers as our research progressed. I will describe these concepts in
my next blog providing a clear demarcation between these approaches.
Please note that my descriptions are
more from the way these approaches should be and may not fit into the way
things currently are. In most of the models that I have seen, I do not see any
difference between SMI and SIAM. At times SMO also looks too similar.
Hello Sumit,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the lesson in the evolution of multi-vendor management approaches. For your information, I believe that AXELOS are soon to be publishing two white papers on SIAM'; the first one is to be released in January 2015 and the second one before April 2015. Given the position that AXELOS have with promoting 'best practice', I would imagine that these two documents will become the de-facto sources of reference on SIAM for many organisations and consultants (for quite a while).
I look forward to these white papers with great anticipation .......