The Story of 'Making SIAM Work - Adopting Service Integration And Management For Your Business

Service Integration And Management (SIAM) is unfortunately being used to replace ITIL® by many ITIL® practitioners. Many of them are packaging ITIL® or some of its processes as SIAM. It is unfortunate that people do not want to understand what SIAM is and try to position it in a way they want to in front of their customers. 

Some see SIAM as multi vendor or multi supplier management while many see SIAM as an approach to Major Incident Management in multi vendor environment. Does SIAM really stand for these adoptions or is it something more is what has been troubles many other practitioners whom I have come across?

These are some of the common questions that has been put forth:

Q. If SIAM is about managing multiple suppliers, what is Supplier Management process of ITIL® meant for?

Q, If SIAM is about managing major incidents in multi vendor or multi supplier environment then what is the purpose of Major Incident Management sub process within Incident Management process of ITIL®?

Q. If SIAM is about managing service levels in multi vendor or multi supplier environment then what is the purpose of Service Level Management process of ITIL®?

...the questions like these goes on...

These very questions had trouble me and Rakesh Kumar  approximately 3 years back. We were concerned why we need a new approach like SIAM when already these fundamental aspects are addressed  by ITIL®. More specific to addressing integration of multiple suppliers concepts like MSI (Multi Supplier Integration) and SMI (Service Management Integration) was already available.

• Business services

• Consolidation of business and IT services

• Integration of services to deliver THE business service

• Enable plug-n-play type of scenario for supplier services

• Enable consolidation/deconsolidation of services (Business as well as IT) along with the underlying supporting components during mergers & acquisitions or demergers & spin-offs

• Manage assets in the digital age addressing the need of multiple sourcing options that organizations has

• Manage knowledge spread across suppliers and ensuring that the same is retained with the business

• Enable effective evaluation of value that SIAM brings

So SIAM has to be something different. We tried to understand the reasons that triggered the need of SIAM starting with the observations from various research papers, OGC 's committee's report or initial concept outline on Service Integration and Management (SIAM) and the likes.

All of these led to creation of multiple models, discussions, brainstorming, chucking out one model after another and eventually post multiple iterations we finalized the Fluid-Pump Model. Now, was the time to test the model. Unfortunately a model for concept like SIAM will take years for successful testing in its entirety. This troubled us. How do we do it? We decided to split it into smaller modules and test the pieces across different engagements or customers. These led to further iterations and eventually the model took its final shape that it currently is in. 

We saw SIAM as a future approach or framework for Service Management and not simply IT Service Management. Some call this as Enterprise Service Management or Business Service Management. We call it Service Management in its purest sense. This is precisely what the businesses want and have started asking from its service providers.

SIAM has to enable:

... and many more.

This is what differentiates SIAM from other things that people confuse SIAM with.

Our book Making SIAM Work - Adopting Service Integration and Management addresses precisely the above points and that too not in theory. It provides a step by step guidance that can be used to adopt the model to an organizations specific needs. It provides the guidance for creating the organization for SIAM and then provides the steps that be used to adopt or tweak the governance structure as per the needs of the organization. We understand that SIAM cannot have one model fit all. Thus, the book addresses the need to design your SIAM organization based on the Fluid-Pump model (a mechanical analogy) that fits really well for SIAM. It provides templates that can readily used. We have done it all to make it practical and readily usable. 

It also provides the outline of processes that would enable SIAM besides the ones that can extrapolated or adopted from ITIL® along with the information systems that would enable SIAM. 

Book, next in the series will provide the SIAM process framework.

Snapshot of "Making SIAM Work - Adopting Service Integration And Management For Your Business"

Today IT services are being provisioned through infrastructure that is located within the organizations premises or 3^rd party premises. Many IT organizations are also adopting various cloud based delivery models as well. Businesses utilize the IT services for delivering the business services, as business enabler, for business communications, etc. Thus, their reliance on IT and newer technologies is increasing every day.

With the advent of outsourcing the IT service delivery is itself dependent on service providers. A study suggests that on average every organization has outsourced to at least 3-5 IT service providers irrespective of the business domain. With multi-sourcing organizations tend to become a hotpot of the various practices from vendors. While at micro level the management lies with the vendors and they can do it well, the overall consolidation of services remains a challenge for the businesses. The Business services that are formed by the combination of smaller underlying services lack uniformity from design, to transitions to operations. This results in service packages that are either incompatible with each other or require a big integration effort. The biggest impact of this is clearly visible in slower time to market and increase in number of changes to the services .Vendors tend to solve this by associating themselves at higher levels, provide larger set of managed services. Here they call themselves as partners for the business, and try to drive services as seamlessly as possible, but in turn they charge heavily for this. Meanwhile there is no control of businesses on the individual (micro) services. All of this has made management & delivery of business services complex and challenging than ever before. Cost benefit passed on by these hybrid environments goes down the drain due to challenges in managing them. Thus, dilemma for the business is ‘How to get the control, uniformity and costs at an optimum level?’ SIAM is an answer to the Dilemma.

Moreover we come across situations where incumbent service providers are more often replaced by new service providers. The main driver of such changes is the difficulty of businesses to manage the operations. Where one service provider provides lower cost of operations, the other may provide technical acumen of highest level. Unfortunately, getting a balanced package is rare. The businesses try to cope with these shortcomings by adding the funds to projects over a period of time. And as the threshold is breached, businesses look for new suppliers to meet their needs. The change may be good in some aspects, but the cost associated with the transition and stabilization of services is painful and considerably high.

Since delivery of Services are fragmented in a multi-vendor environment with different service components being sourced from separate vendors, there are grey areas in context of ownership of overall service delivery. It is unfortunate that structure of multi-vendor or multi-sourced environment makes management of vendors besides governance of process and activities a very complicated task. Multi-sourced environments rely heavily on the core management competency of the business to deliver seamless services. Also, every organization has certain tools & processes which are unique to them and so is true for the vendor organizations. Thus, complexity of integration of multiple tools, processes and people besides the overall governance in a multi-vendor environment present a perplexing view of services that easily gives up on efficiency and effectiveness.

SIAM aims at strengthening this core and provides the directions to the suppliers and vendors to deliver defined outcomes. This drives effectiveness and efficiency of the services as expected by the business, but not as projected by the supplier.

Due to the grey area imposed by multi-vendor environment, we often find organizations to be in a situation where one vendor tries to pass on the accountability to another vendor for concerns related to delivery of services that have vendor inter-dependency and shared accountability. This creates the scenarios where there is finger pointing between the vendors resulting in key performance indicators getting blurred.

The resultant of scattered governance and multiple hierarchies is that the business suffers. They face an even daunting task to ensure that business service delivery to the end customer is not affected. Thus, the challenges of multi-vendor environment make the management of end customers, transitions and vendors even more challenging.

SIAM provides a structure to how the various suppliers interact and support each other. The dependencies between the services (by different vendors) are identified and SLA’s are designed to support the overarching services. The vendors get plugged into a structure (SIAM) that pushes suppliers to bring the best forward while appreciating the goods from other suppliers. The disputes are handled through a credit system (based on the dependencies), which leads to penalties and rewards.

Another challenge that organizations face is service and vendor consolidation during mergers & acquisitions or deconsolidation during demergers and spin-offs.

Thus, questions that every CxO possibly have are:

• How can all the above challenges be simplified?

• How can the impact of vendor change on their organization be minimized?

• How can the effect and impact of mergers & acquisitions or spin-offs on service and vendor consolidation neutralised?

The answer is a highly flexible integration model which ensures that service management becomes a strategic asset for the organization. A scalable SIAM keeps its options open to accept or reject vendors based on their performance, while giving adequate level of feedback to improve. It brings an ease of plugging or de- plugging a vendor whenever the need be without impacting the business service delivery. Besides it also simplifies the process of service consolidation and deconsolidation at the business or strategic layer. This model is in line with the Service Management And Integration (SIAM).

My book "Making SIAM Work - Adopting Service Integration And Management For Your Business" provides explanation about the concepts of SIAM using a mechanical fluid-pump analogy. It provides a model which would effectively and successfully make SIAM work for your business, providing a clear step-by-step solution for adopting and implementing SIAM. It highlights the prerequisites and outputs that would enable organizations to use SIAM in achieving desired outcomes.