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.
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