The Service-Mâché

By:
Rakesh Kumar 
Sumit K. Jha

A Papier-mâché is an amazing material. It can create amazing shapes that can surprise as well as astound you. After all, it’s just the pieces of paper bound with adhesives like glue and starch to produce strong material that can take any shape. While paper is the key ingredient, the art of creating a Mâché lies in preparing the binding material (can be a mixture of water and flour or other starch, mixed to the consistency of heavy cream or complex chemical glues) and smearing it along.

Future of products and services lies in our ability to integrate the capabilities. With more and more innovations connecting to each other, the venue for bigger innovations opens up. The idea of integration is not new, but this has always been understood in piece meals. Understanding it in the full, at all levels and developing frameworks for managing it is a prerequisite to fulfill the needs of next generation products and services.

It’s been already predicted by a few in the industry that the next path breaking products and services would come from small players. This just highlights the predicament that can be caused due to number of products that try to make sense for a business. While some of them can aim at specific customer needs, remaining and most of them would have to focus on how to integrate and collaborate. Like brokers!!

Variety of products and services with multiple suppliers pose challenges that do not meet the eye easily. While utility of services and products is enhanced by integration; the warranty, which includes availability, need to be maintained as per the business requirements.

A Gartner research estimated the hourly cost of downtime as USD 42,000 in 2005. Another study by Gartner in 2011 pegged the cost of IT downtime at USD 26.5 billion in lost revenue each year.  Neverfail’s Outages Report 2013 suggests that average cost of data center downtime across industries is approximately USD 5,600 per minute. This does not attribute the loss to brand value or reputation.

Unplanned downtime, an evil that is cursed by every business, feeds on underlying shortcomings of an IT organization to manage itself. These include:

• Reactive IT support and services
• Disintegrated processes
• Bad knowledge management across the organization
• Improper mapping of business needs and IT capability
• Lack of agility in IT to match business changes like mergers/demergers/acquisitions /spin-offs

All these get exaggerated in a multi-supplier (internal or external) environment and hence the need of integration ameliorates.

While there is a fair understanding of the need of integration in the market today, there is blatant confusion on the framework to be adopted. The frameworks too depict a conservative picture of their   applicability. Service providers have practically used their own capabilities as fences to the scope of integration frameworks, and this has resulted in restricted and rather insufficient research on the subject matter. That’s more so is a reason why we see so many frameworks, each, ironically, requiring a need of further integration.

The concept of integration has taken all these forms with one form differing from other in many aspects. The common concepts used are SIAM (Service Integration and Management), MSI (Multi-Supplier Integration) and SMI (Supplier Management Integration). Surprisingly, many use them interchangeably. Below is simple deciphering of a few:

1. Legacy SI: Typically such suppliers are traditionally responsible for some of the process of Service Operation and Service Transition. They drive CSI for the activities (or technical towers) they own. If organizational processes for these lifecycle phases are available, they would follow these processes else they would use their proprietary set of processes. In many cases it has been experienced that either the documented processes does not exist or it is not followed. We can say that in Legacy SI the degree of process maturity is low.

1. SMI: SMI are responsible for all processes of Service Operation and Service Transition besides most of the processes of Service Design. A matured SMI drives CSI for the processes that are in the scope of SMI across the suppliers. It is process driven as the basic building block is a centralized service management layer. It has a high degree of process adherence and process maturity.

1. SIAM: SIAM is responsible for the entire lifecycle of ITSM. It drives continual evolution across the lifecycle phases and the suppliers through CSI.

However, the standard approach or framework has still eluded the industry.

The future of services is demanding. While resting on the shoulders of multiple suppliers, these call for -  better customer focus, alignment of business strategies, policies & objectives, return on value (ROV), proactive operations, technically advanced tools & platforms, governance across all layers and heavy automation; a comprehensive framework is needed that can address all and has space for improvements.

Not just to achieve seamless integration, this framework must be practical and aim to enable organizations with:

• Ideation and conception of new products and services

• Innovations

• Faster response to market dynamics

• Smoother production and delivery of products  and services

• Satisfied workforce
• Cumulative knowledge for decision making
• Continual improvements

Meanwhile, should provide means to realise investment done in people, knowledge and technology.

SIAM is the concept that encapsulates all the above and when looked with broad sight, can reap benefits to businesses IT and Non-IT alike. SIAM must be implemented with a larger roadmap that looks at the strategic needs of the business while being able to deliver tactically. The suppliers must be enabled to work in tandem to yield synergy and innovation. The supplier’s addition and removal must be made efficient and so must be the creation of new products & services. A feedback mechanism should ensure that the right information flows for continual improvement of services. And the visibility of services must be ensured to business and management.

The Service-Mâché is going to be used to shape the businesses of future, with suppliers as paper strips and SIAM as the glue. How strong the glue is, depends on what it’s made up of.

The book on SIAM 'Making SIAM Work - Adopting Service Integration And Management For Your Business' from the authors tries to address the need of an approach or model for SIAM along with the above aspects of the Next Generation IT organization. It suggests a model for SIAM and the way it can be implemented in a practical manner.

Evolution of Multi-Vendor Management Approaches - SIAM, SMI and MSI

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.