Case Study ABB: The SIAM journey to global networked IT

Case Study ABB: The SIAM journey to a global networked IT.

A field report from the SIAM Body of Knowledge co-Autor

Markus Müller, Blueponte Co-Founder and Corporate Information Systems GRC Experience Manager at ABB writes about the journey to global IT at ABB. A field report by the SIAM Body of Knowledge co-author, who combines practice with theory, as we like to practice at Blueponte.

Digitale Transformation has catalyzed ways of working.

The digital transformation has catalyzed a rewrite of the rules and changes in working methods. In the last two to three years, deficiencies in consistent IT work methods have also been uncovered in Austria. These shortcomings are gradually being remedied.

Existing, “pure” agile projects are now grounded in the facts. We keep seeing DevSecOps approached like a technology project. That is not the last word, because it is more about changing the corporate culture. Tactical successes are achieved in many places, but if they are not orchestrated as part of an end-to-end solution, they can restrict the supply of IT services and create additional costs and complexity for the organization. The focus has to be bigger and this is exactly where Service Integration and Management (SIAM) offers an answer to what is often simply referred to as “digitization”. A little more than a third of the top 25 companies for 2020 in the Gartner ranking have redefined their operating models in recent years. They did this to provide the required end-to-end ability to manage distributed services. Among them is the ABB Group, which I have been accompanying on the SIAM journey for six years now.

Improve collaboration between business organizations.

I focus in my work on how we can work better and how we can improve the cooperation between the different business organizations, which all have their own IT, and the global business IT organization. ABB’s IT has evolved from a centralized, more monolithic approach with a classic separation between infrastructure and applications to a flexible organization with a multi-sourcing approach and is now moving to federal governance.

In retrospect, I can now ask myself what I would have done differently with today’s knowledge six years ago when I started at ABB, when I accepted the assignment to set up a global SIAM organization.

I am very proud to have accompanied ABB on an exciting and instructive SIAM transformation journey over the past few years. And I am convinced that the company’s IT organization is perfectly positioned to take advantage of its new operating model. We built the IT organization on SIAM principles and practices, and although we are still in the transition phase, I can name several key key questions that need to be answered in order to embed the new ways of working in our daily work.

The factors of success.

The success factors include:

  1. Is there a vision for SIAM?
  2. How strong is the tower mentality or the silo thinking within the organization?
  3. Are there robust frameworks built on industry best practices?
  4. Is there enough maturity to build trusting relationships with suppliers?
  5. Does the organization value agile organizational changes?
  6. Is there a culture of collaborative thinking to drive the overall value proposition of IT?
  7. Does the organization have a history of iterative approaches to implementing SIAM competencies?
  8. What do contracts and cooperation agreements look like, is the organization used to dealing with formal guidelines?
  9. Is there a culture or ambition for what we call the end-to-end ownership mentality in SIAM?

If I think back to 2015 and try to answer these questions from the perspective of that time, it becomes clear in retrospect how big the challenge was, because apart from questions 1 and 5 there were no clear answers at that time. Taking on the challenge anyway made our personal SIAM trip at ABB even more interesting and appealing than SIAM projects already are.

These nine questions are the most important questions I would ask today before accepting a job as a leader in a SIAM organization.

In my next post, you can find out why this is the case, which will be online next week. Follow us on LinkedIn to not miss a blog entry.

Case Study ABB: The SIAM Vision

Case Study ABB: The SIAM Vision

A field report from the SIAM Body of Knowledge co-author.

Markus Müller, Blueponte Co-Founder and Corporate Information Systems GRC Experience Manager at ABB writes about the journey to global IT at ABB. A field report by the SIAM Body of Knowledge co-author, who combines practice with theory, as we like to practice at Blueponte.

A vision conveys a long-term view.

Today I would like to write on the subject of “SIAM Vision”. Perhaps you will now think that visions are more esoteric. That may be true, but managers also need the creativity to describe their mission statement for the ideal state of the organization with a crisp statement. This has many advantages, for example a vision can show what a service integration function has to offer. A vision conveys a long-term view that describes how we would like to see our surroundings and ourselves in them. It shows the employees the meaning and describes the bigger picture of a desired target state.

And good visions also implicitly contain the value contribution of the organization. This gives you a direction with which the members of the organization, in this case the employees of a service integrator, can identify.

I worked on the vision with my management team in several workshops. In retrospect, this work was very valuable. We agreed that the fewer words the vision statement has, the better. We found this out simply by discussing the statements of larger companies, which from our point of view were very successful.

We finally came to the following statement for our SIAM organization: “We are the global conductors of integrated service operations”

Since I appreciate classical music very much and never miss an opportunity to be present at rehearsals with large orchestras with their conductor, I have been able to study the interactions between conductor and orchestra over and over again. I found many of them fascinating, because the way in which successful conductors deal with the individual groups in the orchestra is neither based on a relationship that one calls “the conductor is the king” or “the conductor is the supplicant” could. Rather, I had the impression that they were treated very respectfully on an equal footing. Conductors like to describe what they would like to hear from the musicians in a very graphic way.

At the time, I took this as a model to describe the ideal state in which managers at the integrator should best talk to the managers at the service providers.

 

The conductor with his orchestra.

I chose the familiar image of how a conductor interacts with the orchestra in order to make the employees in my organization understand what we stand for as integrators and what justifies our existence. It is easy to understand what a network department or a hosting tower does in an IT organization. What an integrator does is not that easy to understand. That is why we were certainly seen like a foreign body in ABB’s IT environment at the time.

If I had only described this in many PowerPoint slides, we would never have gotten any further. We made real progress in dealing with us as integrators and the many service providers when we really exemplified SIAM in the way we dealt with everyone.

Originally I wanted to find a caricature in which the conductor looks at the orchestra and all the musicians have their backs to the conductor, because that was actually the situation I was in when the journey began.

How did we finally turn the tide? In retrospect, I am convinced that the visual part of our vision contributed to this. I could have woken everyone in my team at some point during the night to ask about the vision and they would have told me who we are without hesitation: “global conductors of integrated service operations”.

Ideally, a vision should be self-explanatory. Nevertheless, I kept referring to it at larger events, e.g. when it came to communicating our SIAM strategy and our annual planning.

Two essential things.

Two things have turned out to be essential:

  • We are there to keep the complexity of our supplier environment away from our customers so that the customers perceive an IT organization that is as coherent as possible without having to worry about the underlying networks of IT services.
  • We are the function that drives the global standardization of processes and procedures in order to make operations as transparent, efficient and simple as possible.

Working out a vision in a team and creating it first for the team and then later for everyone else, that made communication about what I wanted to achieve a lot easier in retrospect. It pulled people in the same direction and gave their work more meaning.

Would you also like to reduce the complexity in your company and align your IT organization to SIAM? Contact us, we are pleased to help you.

A customer journey: SIAM is not always named SIAM

A customer journey: SIAM is not always named SIAM

We finished an assignment with a customer.

Earlier this year we finished an assignment with our client Alpega. The perfect time to sum up, reflect and let Alpega tell the story. Alpega Group is a leading global logistics software company offering modular solutions that cover all complex transportation and logistics needs. By bringing together the best solutions and market expertise, the Alpega Group has created the transportation industry’s only scalable end-to-end software suite.

In 2019 Alpega decided to approach a huge challenge: Alpega’s products were already fully SaaS and supporting hundreds of customers across the world, but they were running in a private data center of their prior owners. Alpega’s mission was to take them to the public cloud world – Azure and Oracle. 

Co-Founder of Blueponte joined the challenge as advisor.

Ronald Kränzl, Co-Founder of Blueponte, joined the challenge in late 2019 as advisor and consultant to support the process of selecting and negotiating the future partner. His add-on challenge was to detect blind spots and enrich the team with his experience from other projects of this category.

In the course of the initial project phase business cases were improved constantly with more current data as the negotiations went on. In order to fully exploit expected advantages that result from the migration project, a governance for the future service delivery had to be put in place.

Governance always starts with roles and responsibilities and is closely followed by selecting the right people to take on these roles. Luckily the right person to fill the very crucial role of the Service Manager could be found within the existing management team.

In spring 2020 the contracting client, the CIO, decided to leave and Ronald was appointed to expand his duties and to run the department on an interim basis until a new CIO was found. In summer 2020 the negotiations were finalized and the contracts with Alpega’s Cloud Partner and the Partner for the migration project and managed service was signed. The first lock-down in Europe was eased, but the teams still weren’t allowed to come together physically, which was an additional burden for everyone involved.

Many SIAM practices have been applied.

The migration project was kicked-off and the preparation of a series of systems shifts from hosting partners to the cloud started and were tested intensively. The transition work started. The new CIO was chosen and onboarded in October. In parallel to his leadership role Ronald conveyed all the information he collected by then to bring the new CIO up to speed quickly. After the budgeting phase the onboarding was finalized in January 2021. The project was running on a tough but steady course and so it was the right time to step out.

Todd DeLaugther, Alpega Group CEO adds “I had the pleasure of working with the Blueponte Team and Ronald Kränzl, during a complex transition period. We lost our CIO right in the middle of a complex data center carve out, while moving a full stack SaaS application from a private data center to public cloud. Ronald stepped in and took on the management of the team as well as the Data Center carve-out, working with our vendor sourcing manager to get all contracts in place, take the existing plan and evolve it to the success plan we have today. Blueponte and Ronald have been an invaluable member of our team for the past 12 months.”

Ronald: “I am very glad that I had the opportunity to work with Alpega. I’ve met wonderful people and working together was an honor for me. Reflecting back, I know that the goal was not to implement SIAM, but really it was all about Service Integration and Management. We have applied many SIAM practices and maybe, when the time is right, the SIAM story will be continued.”

Multi-Provider Management. How does it work?

Multi-Provider Management. How does it work?

A series about Service Provider Management.

Welcome to our multi-part series that looks at the topic of service provider management from different angles, provides tips and tricks, highlights potential hurdles and discusses important topics such as governance. The first part of the series asks the central question: who are my providers and how can the collaboration be characterized?

Part 1: Who are my providers?

When you think about provider management, the associations are often related to delegation, reporting and control tasks. We wouldn’t be Blueponte if we didn’t take a broader and more nuanced look at it.

Blueponte’s customers are companies that use a broad spectrum of information technology (IT) for their value creation. These IT services are partly provided by in-house IT departments and complemented by a variety of external companies contracted by the IT department. These are the categories of externally sourced IT:

  • Hardware, such as workplace infrastructure, smartphones, network components
  • Software, such as licenses, SaaS, operating systems, application software
  • Managed services, such as hosting services, network services, workplace services
  • Commodity services, such as IaaS and IaaP, mobile communication
  • External staff, such as freelancers and consultants

The term service provider is used for suppliers of managed services and commodity services. Pure hardware, software suppliers and external employees are mentioned for the sake of completeness. They are helpful for the correct classification, but not relevant for our topic. However, it is often the case that hardware or software is part of a Managed Service or a Commodity Service.

While commodity services are provided exclusively by external companies, managed services can be provided inside and outside the company. Managed services provided by external companies are generally referred to as IT outsourcing. In the past, the cost factor played an important role here in outsourcing; today, it is also the lack of know-how and available IT professionals.

In an IT department, services are usually obtained from more than one of the above categories. They are bundled to create IT services that meet the requirements of a department and can be used by the employees. In this context, the IT department is the IT customer and the specialist department is the IT user.

Provision of different IT services

The following diagram illustrates how the various IT services are provided. This overview is important because it serves as a classification. It shows which methods can be used for multi-provider management and what you should take into account.

We have therefore created a characterization and quick tip list for each of the IT service categories.

Characterization and quick-tipps of IT-service categories

External managed service and IT-outsourcing

  • Based on standards, yet you will receive an individual offer
  • Contract with service description available
  • Culture and people are important to the success of the project
  • Requires close coordination in cooperation
  • Expectations are usually higher than actual performance
  • Missing services are demanded via change request procedure
  • Cost pressure on both sides

Commodity Services

  • Standard contracts, non-negotiable
  • No individualization, no say in working methods
  • People and culture usually not decisive
  • Bundling into customer-ready IT services takes place outside the company
  • Good price-performance ratio because pricing is transparent

Internal managed service, internal IT staff:

  • Bundle the purchased services into a service suitable for the customer – refinement
  • Loyal, strong identification with the customer organization
  • Substitution and compensation for insufficient services
  • Training of internal customers
  • Low appreciation of services provided
  • Internal service providers
  • Coordination and management of external suppliers, both in terms of content and organization
  • Formulating the needs and consulting for possible solutions
  • Takes on service integrator tasks

Do you have an overview of the IT provider landscape in general and can you classify who the IT providers are in your organization? This is an important first step in setting up multi-provider management correctly. In the next part of our series, we will address the question of “controlling or leading”.

The Service Integrator and Construction Site Supervision – The Limits of an Analogy

The Service Integrator and Construction Site Supervision - The Limits of an Analogy

"Building a house is a project, right?"

The attentive and experienced SIAM reader will certainly not have failed to notice that there may have been a slight inconsistency in the last article. She or he will have asked himself the legitimate question: “Building a house is a project, right? Actually, the service integrator would have to be used in a later phase, the so-called “operating phase” (or utilization phase in house construction)?”

The answer to this question is “yes and no”. The service integrator performs his activities mainly in the operational phase, that’s true. However, it is beneficial to establish or involve this important function in a SIAM (Service Integration And Management) operating model very early in the journey, and not only in the operational phase. This ensures that even before selecting and onboarding new service providers, experience and input on topics such as contract design, SLA’s, roles & processes, etc. can be incorporated into negotiations with potential providers.

Let’s now move to the subject of construction site supervision or operation.

To stay with the analogy of building a house, let’s bring the role of property management into play. After the house is completed and handed over to the client for use, a property management company is hired. A property manager, depending on the requirements of the customer, takes on the responsibility for clearly specified, recurring activities in the management of the property. These activities include:     

  • Financial Management (cost control, billing)
  • Reporting on the services rendered by providers
  • Optimization of contracts 

And here, too, we see a similarity between the basic services of property management and those of a service integrator. In detail, of course, the areas clearly differ in their characteristics. But basically, in both cases, the customer hands over the responsibility of control to a specially designated function. 

SIAM: four different models.

SIAM provides four different models for the provision of the service integrator function:

Internal Service Integrator: the customer organization assumes the role of Service Integrator. Typically, this model is used when the customer wants to retain control over the integrator function, or when company-related, regulatory or legal conditions require it.

External service integrator: Here, the role is entrusted to an independent, external organization. The advantage here is that you can draw from existing skills and experience quickly, and implement quick wins (e.g., existing processes, templates, etc.)

Hybrid service integrator: In this case, tasks and responsibilities are divided, with the final responsibility remaining in the customer organization. This makes sense if you do not want to hand over responsibility, but you may not have the necessary skills in-house.

Lead provider model: A service provider assumes the role of lead supplier. In this case, however, there is usually no direct contractual relationship between the integrator (the lead supplier) and other providers. This is also the difference to the general contractor, where the JV holds the contracts with the subcontractors, and these are not visible to the customer organization.

Which model to choose depends heavily on the customer’s situation. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, listing them is beyond the scope of this article. 

Finally, a few thoughts on the chosen topic.  We are aware that the comparison with the construction industry is a bold one. The industries are not comparable in terms of technical content. However, the challenges are definitely the same. Our goal here is to look at a complex topic such as SIAM from a different perspective. 

How do you see it? I look forward to your comments on the topic!

 

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Can someone please explain to me what a service integrator is?

Was ist ein Service Integrator

Can someone please explain to me what a service integrator is?

Buzzwords - a new "IT word" every week.

From the cloud to digital transformation, Scrum, DevOps to SIAM and now the service integrator. Not a week goes by without a new IT buzzword. So today we are looking at the latter, the service integrator. What does the service integrator have in common with a construction site supervisor? It turns out a lot. It is the easiest way to explain what a service integrator does.

The construction site supervisor and the service integrator

Cost pressure, quality and the often missing overall responsibility play an essential role in IT. In construction, as we Austrians like to say, it has long been recognized that an additional authority is required to coordinate the suppliers and customers involved in the sense of end-to-end responsibility – a construction site supervision.

The “building supervision” controls the construction work on behalf of the client, as the client usually does not have the necessary experience and competence. Basically, the interaction, the orchestration and the suppliers involved are monitored and controlled.

In the SIAM (Service Integration And Management) context, this means that the Service Integrator assumes this function and performs it on behalf of the customer organization (IT). Regardless of whether the external, internal, hybrid integrator model or the lead supplier model is used – what the differences are can be read on SIAM Insights, it must be clearly regulated which powers and responsibilities, i.e. rights and obligations, should and can be assumed by the client, i.e. the builder. It must also be clearly regulated which competence the integrator is awarded for managing possible internal service providers. The danger lurks here that the service integrator will be rendered “toothless” due to a lack of authority and support, and thus not taken seriously by the client’s organizational units and the service providers (internal as well as external) to be controlled.
 

In the course of the execution, the site supervision ensures that all providers / suppliers provide the services specified in the contract and regulates possible deviations from them. She is also responsible for the following activities:

  • Representation of the client’s interests
  • Coordination & control of the executing companies
  • Financial Management & Controlling
  • Defects are identified and rectified – Continual Service Improvement.
These activities are basically the same as those of a service integrator in a SIAM model.
The construction supervision is also not to be equated with the construction management. This is another important role in a construction project. The “construction management” is usually carried out by an executing company. In our case, that would be the role of the service delivery manager of the respective service provider. This serves as a mouthpiece for the organization of the respective provider and as a contact person for the service integrator.
 

SIAM: a management model for controlling several service providers

Service Integration And Management (SIAM) is a management model for controlling multiple service providers in IT outsourcing. All right? Do you now dare to use the Service Integrator in your IT conversations? If you have any further questions about SIAM and multi-provider management, the experts at Blueponte will be happy to help. 

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The renewal of the SIAM Body of Knowledge

The renewal of the SIAM Body of Knowledge

The second edition has been published: what's new, what have we contributed to it?

An eventful year is coming to an end. Reason enough to look back on some of its positive highlights. For us, this includes the publication of the second edition of the SIAM Body of Knowledge. Markus Müller, co-author of the SIAM Body of Knowledge & Blueponte co-founder, gives valuable insights into the SIAM world and how it has evolved in 2020.

The SIAM development in numbers

A lot has happened since the Foundation Body of Knowledge was first published in January 2017. Here is a quick look at the numbers: there are now more than 10,000 downloads, successful certifications in more than 36 countries and the annual market analysis for SIAM shows that it is now a global and relevant method. The understanding of SIAM has evolved and the application of SIAM knowledge, i.e., what is possible, how the concepts can be implemented across industries, has increased significantly. The market itself has also changed. A good example is the much-wanted inclusion of agile methods for the provision of services. Most frameworks have been adapted accordingly. Hence it was time to adapt the concepts, contents and theory to reflect the latest developments.

Bringing trust to sourcing

The team of authors worked hard to determine which chapters should be renewed and which should be added. True to the Blueponte claim of “Bringing Trust To IT Sourcing” the focus was put on describing the practices and procedures of a trust-based approach to managing multiple suppliers. For example, we investigated which factors determine the building of trust and how the supposed contradiction between pure contract-based multi-supplier management and the trust-based interactions of all actors can be resolved in the direction of increased productivity.

Right from the start, it was clear that it will be revision and not a redefinition of the SIAM basics. We integrated new fields of knowledge based on the existing principles, made additional support tools available and improved the consistency of concepts and the use of the technical language.

In a project of this kind, where the overall success depends on the collaboration of individual authors the revised edition is a fantastic learning opportunity and offers a broad terrain for applying what we, as authors have learned as SIAM practitioners. It’s also about the way we ensured quality and consistency, which was unique and just as educational as the content itself, which we developed together from our different backgrounds and experiences. In doing so, we, the entire Blueponte team, made use of our shared experience. As a result, the contributions to the SIAM Body of Knowledge were enriched with our experiences, ideas and opinions.

So not everything that brought us in 2020 was negative. We look forward to the next year to continue what we have created this year. Follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates.

Service Nerds SIAM Q&A

Service Nerds SIAM Q&A

What you need to know about Service Integration and Management.

A few days ago Robert Sieber from the Service Nerds interviewed Markus Müller, co-founder of Blueponte, on the topic of SIAM. You can listen to the interview here, or read on to find out more.

Which problem does SIAM solve?

SIAM lets you combine the advantages of multi-sourcing, i.e. best of breed from every vendor, with the simplicity of single-sourcing. The service provision should look simple for customers. Even if a complex network of service providers has to be controlled, the complexity should be unnoticeable for the customer. The aim is to align the entire value chain with the customer in mind.

This is what an external service integrator is used for. The service integrator must act independently of individual providers. If a company acts as an integrator and is also a service provider, it can lead to a conflict of objectives. If you want to know more about the role of a Service Integrator, read here.

How does SIAM solve the problems of Multi-Sourcing?

There are a variety of contractual and informal relationships in a SIAM ecosystem. SIAM steps right into the agreements and interaction in the relationship triangle between customer, integrator and service provider. It also takes the interactions between the individual service providers into account. The ultimate measurement is how satisfied the customer organization is with the overall service performance. However, the issue of billing services is also of great importance. In many technically savvy organizations, the competencies for billing are missing. These are skills that define a good service integrator. The presence of the service integrator is a prerequisite for SIAM.

The reasons why what has been agreed is often not achieved can often be attributed to a lack of role clarity. The service integrator has a moderating role here. In particular, any form of finger-pointing has to be addressed and avoided.

What is the role of the service integrator?

A key goal of the service integrator is to reduce the complexity of the value chain and to offer enough information for effective decision-making. This can be done at the operational or the tactical level. Incident management could serve as an example for a distributed WAN service that is provided for different components and with different partners for each country. The application of SIAM practices makes a significant contribution to reducing complexity and ensuring the continuity of service provision.

Another essential point that SIAM addresses is a dynamic that has accompanied outsourcing from the start. Most of the time, a customer organization begins to substitute services provided by the service provider that are not in accordance with the contract, regardless of whether this is done consciously or unconsciously. Service providers are starting to rely on it because they know from experience that there is still an authority to step in anyway. This can occur, for example, when service levels expire. One solution is to work consistently on the process and service level and not on the level of operational tasks and backlogs. However, it requires a different mindset and different skills. In the short term, substitution can help to counter customer pressure. In the long term, however, it often turns out to be a trap, because the exception becomes the rule. As simple as this sounds in theory, the decisions are difficult to make in practice because they also risk escalation through business areas.

In other words, too strong a technical orientation is rather a hindrance for a service integrator. The recruiting for employees of the service integrator must pay attention to this and look for a service integrator-specific skill profile.

What is the added value of a service integrator?

There is agreement on the question of where the value contribution of the service integrator lies. It is not incident handling but ensuring communication between the actors.

The aim of SIAM is to coordinate different types of service providers with different degrees of maturity in such a way that the services can be complemented and merged into a business service.

The provocative thesis in the interview, according to which very few providers can actually deliver services, can hardly be contradicted from the customer’s point of view. In our experience, however, the change in perspective shows that the provision of services is blocked by the dependencies on the customer and the lack of transparency. This is exactly where the service integrator is required as a neutral mediator. However, SIAM requires an established service management. SIAM is based on service management and is taking the next step: away from individual service providers, towards a network of providers. SIAM can also be used as a specific further development of service management for cloud computing.

Can the large cloud providers be controlled by a comparatively small company? Maybe not. SIAM adopts a different attitude towards the cloud provider. The distinction between whether the partner is seen as a ‘High Trust’ or a ‘Low Trust’ partner is crucial when it comes to how it is integrated into the SIAM ecosystem. A large cloud provider will probably be classified as a ‘high trust’ partner and we trust that they will have their processes under control. On the other hand, classic outsourcing partners with different shoring types are more likely to be classified as low trust.

In the interview, the thesis was initially put forward that SIAM might become obsolete in a distant future in which only cloud services exist. However, in the course of the discussion, this was seen as an extreme and rather theoretical scenario, as IT will always be dealing with a hybrid form for an indefinite period of time. Many of the fundamentals of SIAM are not new and are known and proven knowledge and best practices.

Good service integrators know that it is not about a purely technical integration, but about the process of bringing the service providers closer together. At the beginning there is always uncertainty and it is about establishing trust in order to create the feeling of unity. At its core it’s all about trust, because that’s the glue that holds every organization and society together.

This is why we at Blueponte bring trust to IT-Sourcing.

How SIAM supports the digital transformation?

How SIAM supports the digital transformation?

Terms such as digitization, IoT, cloud, bimodale IT, agile and DevOPs are with us all the time.

The increasing speed of change in our daily life, especially in the area of ​​digitization, has made many technologies and concepts obsolete.

Digitization, IoT, Cloud, Bimodal IT, Agile and DevOps are terms that are with us all the time. Although many can no longer hear them and are sometimes skeptical about the practicality of some concepts, from my point of view the value that these concepts bring are worth taking a closer look. 

What does digitale transformation mean?

Digital transformation is the embedding and use of digital technologies and services in many areas of a company. This leads to changes in the way companies work and how they add value for their customers.

The trend towards “Everything as a Service” and the selection of the most suitable provider (Best of Breed) is leading to an increase in the number of different service providers and suppliers in the IT supply chain, which must be managed efficiently. Even as a small company, it is not unusual to have a dozen different providers quite quickly. This is where a management model like SIAM comes in. It makes the complexity in a multi-sourcing environment more transparent and enables efficient control of the provision of services.

For those readers who believe SIAM is a cat, or a Far Eastern travel destination, I would like to briefly explain what it is actually about. For this I would like to use the original text from the official publication (SIAM Foundation Body of Knowledge): 

“Service Integration and Management (SIAM) is a management method that can be used in an environment that procures services from different service providers. SIAM has a different focus than traditional multi-sourced ecosystems with one customer and multiple suppliers. It offers governance, management, integration, security and coordination to ensure that customer organizations get maximum benefit from their service providers. “

Find the full publication here: Link to Scopism Body of Knowledge

Why consider SIAM for an organization on the digital journey?

IT departments are faced with the great challenge of enabling the digitization projects of the business units and advising and accompanying them during implementation. As a result, the capacities required for stable operation and control of the providers are aligned to the new challenges and must manage the balancing act between innovation and service stability. Often it is the same people who are responsible for the configuration and maintenance of technical systems who work on digitization projects, who then also have to take the lead in controlling suppliers. There is a “skill gap” between the management of tickets and the management of supplier contracts. This is not only inefficient, but also puts the responsible people and the respective organization under a lot of pressure.

The use of SIAM and the establishment of a central function, the service integrator, allows an organization to focus on the management of internal and external service providers and the provision of a smooth end-to-end service for customers. This frees up capacities within the company, which can be used in a targeted manner in other digitalization and innovation projects.

Another opportunity that SIAM offers is the ability to quickly and efficiently integrate new suppliers or service providers into an existing supply chain in an organizational, procedural and technical manner. With an ever-increasing number of different suppliers and the shorter contract cycles it has become essential to create more efficient structures. From drafting contracts, provider onboarding, creation of standardized governance structures, comprehensive performance management to supplier offboarding. SIAM creates the structures that enable sustainable multi-provider management in a digital world.

If you have already had experience or if you would like to exchange ideas with us, we would be very happy to hear from you.

Trapped in the multiprovider maze? Process integration shows the way!

Trapped in the multiprovider maze?

Process integration shows the way!

Services must function internally and across company boundaries. No matter which processes and tools involved partners use. That is the expectation nowadays. In reality, email and Excel still rule. Lorenz Schnöpf, from Blueponte, Roland Csombai from Lomnido and Peter Karas from Kapsch BusinessCom discussed with around 50 participants of the ITSM partner regulars this week how things should be better in the future. Here is the conclusion of the regulars’ table:

At the beginning, all participants of the round table clearly stated that an increase in the number of different providers have been seen over the past few years. These should also be managed primarily by the internal IT, that much is agreed. The right roadmap or the specific plan for how this should happen is still missing.

The missing service integrator

On this occasion, Lorenz Schnöpf presented the concept of the Service Integrator. This function did not previously exist in companies that operate outsourcing. A service integrator is the function that bears overall responsibility for the holistic provision of services from different suppliers and assumes their control. The service integrator is a single, logical unit that is responsible for the optimal end-to-end delivery of services. Figuratively speaking, the service integrator is a kind of building supervisor or conductor.

This function is a central component of Service Integration and Management (SIAM); the basic work on this model is the SIAM Body of Knowledge.

How can you connect different tools, processes and organizations with one another?

In a sourcing environment where different parties work together, the integration of processes and tools for seamless service delivery is often a major hurdle. Through specialized tools such as the Lomnido SIAM Broker, these challenges can be solved very elegantly. Its use enables seamless integration and collaboration on the process level, as well as quick and flexible connection of new partners and providers.

SIAM oder not?

Is the Service Integration and Management Model what organizations should align themselves with? Or is it a hype that is about to subside? All those who have been working for a long time have seen many management models come and go over the years. So, of course, this question at the ITSM partner’s regular table is also a legitimate one. There is also the current study by Scopism on the prevalence of SIAM in the DACH region and in an international comparison. In a nutshell: SIAM is already widespread as a young management model, especially where the complexity is increasing rapidly. Companies want to take the reins in hand again and better control the performance of their providers. Here the use of SIAM can make an enormous contribution to value. You can find more information on this in the Scopism study.

You could not take part in the virtual ITSM get-together and are interested in learning more about SIAM? Feel free to contact us, or follow us on LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date.