SIAM: The transparency and control role for the hybrid IT environment

SIAM enables organizations to manage multiple suppliers of business and IT services and integrate them to provide a centralized place to manage those services.

SIAM helps IT see who uses which applications, what they cost, and how all the configurations and service levels are aligned, all from a “single pane of glass.”

In getting control of applications, their performance and their costs, the company can then spend less time managing the nuts and bolts of IT and more time growing the business. Think of SIAM as a golden opportunity for IT to become a better business partner, enabling the orchestration and integration required across both traditional and digital services’ life cycles.

SIAM lets IT deliver value by alleviating the five major pain points that typically tarnish the image of IT. The department is perceived as:

• Being an obstacle. LOB owners view IT as an inhibitor to the business. IT inhibits opportunities for innovation and growth.
• Moving too slowly. The IT department has limited ability to introduce new services in a timely manner and onboard or offboard new suppliers quickly.
• Lacking end-to-end (E2E) visibility. There’s little or no E2E visibility across services, processes, providers or partners.
• Lacking proper governance. IT has poor service governance and transparency across systems, preventing true cross-supplier collaboration and overall service standardization.

These perceptions can lead to shadow IT, where LOB units go around IT and sign up for services from external suppliers, creating diversified service models with misaligned SLAs and contracts.

The elements of SIAM

The following features are mandatory for a mature service integration and management (SIAM) capability:

• SIAM processes and procedures. Standardize an end-to-end process framework that enhances proven “classic” IT service management (ITSM) processes and procedures with a functional SIAM layer. This includes standardized on-/offboarding for all hybrid service provider types.
• SIAM governance. Develop a scalable governance framework, shifting the focus from vertical to horizontally integrated governance and vendor management.
• SIAM organization. Identify clear roles and responsibility for an organization measured on integration and collaboration. Capture and aggregate service-level data from service providers; align SLAs and/or operational level agreements (OLAs).
• SIAM tooling and automation. Deploy modern automation and tooling architecture for ITSM to enable true end-to-end integration.

What customers want

Organizations should looks for a number of key features in a SIAM platform.

A consistent customer experience. The goal is to create an environment in which business users can have the services they need when they need them and to offer them the ease of consumption they get with purchased shadow IT, but with IT maintaining control. Today, it has become easy for some business employees to use a company credit card to get that fancy, new presentation software or service. When this occurs, the IT department has no idea what’s happening and the purchase doesn’t register in any of the budgets, so the IT staff can’t manage it

By changing the path, SIAM makes IT more flexible. Business users can now see all the applications available to them on a single, easy-to-use dashboard, which makes IT an enabler. With SIAM, business users know they can easily request new services. They know they can call the service desk for support. They can even experiment and try new applications. SIAM gives them the agility and ease of consumption they need.

Moving forward, business users can consume applications without the mess that causes headaches for top management and IT. There’s no more wasted time or lost budget dollars. Everything purchased gets accounted for in the IT budget, not the LOB budget. And all the applications are more secure because IT’s security standards and policies are enforced. There’s no more rogue file sharing where IT has no idea what programs the LOB staff use and what’s being shared.

Speed and agility. SIAM enables IT to meet evolving business demands and stay agile in a changing marketplace. If the business decides that it needs to change, SIAM offers a mechanism to swap applications in and out easily.

That’s key as companies move to digital models when industries change around them. Automotive companies, for example, are scrambling to develop driverless cars in competition with newcomers such as established tech companies that want a piece of the autonomous driving market.

SIAM gives companies the ability to react to change and manage disruption with a minimum amount of risk, and provides the means for IT to change rapidly. For example, in building autonomous cars, where technology changes constantly, automakers are moving to DevOps to keep up with the rapid changes; agile DevOps processes supported by SIAM are essential.

Instead of IT just supporting the factory, IT has become the product — i.e., delivering a significant amount of the car’s features and functionality. SIAM enables automakers to swap out applications and add infrastructure to meet the data management challenge in a way that affords them control and accountability. It lets them enable the innovation required for success.

More stable operations. By taking advantage of SIAM, IT can reduce operational outages, which translates into cost avoidance and savings. For example, SIAM makes it possible to assess the precise level of an outage (Is only one office down, or is it the entire region?) and enables the company to take corrective actions. If there’s a Basic I/O System (BIOS) upgrade needed to correct an issue, for example, that upgrade is done across the enterprise.

SIAM also lets IT correct small issues. Say your phone app at work doesn’t function well on Friday afternoons. In the past, the applications and network teams might have been pointing fingers. SIAM gets everyone working together through processes introduced as providers onboard to the SIAM service, making it easier to identify the root cause of issues.

That’s where SIAM becomes very powerful. Instead of the constant bickering, issues get resolved quickly. Users are happy because their problems get fixed. IT gets credit for resolving the issues, and management stays happy because the business reduces downtime and runs more efficiently.

Control and transparency. SIAM reduces the risk of the multisourcing environment through joint governance and defined collaboration between suppliers and partners. Through SIAM, companies receive much more detailed reporting on performance levels of suppliers and services.

For example, for one application a company may pay for a 99.99 level of service 24x7, but in actuality run the application only 24x5. Armed with the new information, IT can change the service contract. SIAM gives IT more governance, standards, visibility and control. It also allows the business to see full pricing schedules in multiple views across suppliers, so there may be opportunities to run applications in a more cost-efficient way.

An enforced sourcing strategy. SIAM’s ability to offer end-to-end service levels becomes really powerful when IT is not just “seeing” those service gaps, but actually starts to fix them. When SIAM shows that network performance doesn’t fit the application requirement, IT can harmonize the service by demanding better service levels from suppliers or negotiate new end-to-end SLAs.

SIAM also creates an environment where IT serves as an “advisor” that anticipates and then shifts where the business needs to go as it dynamically changes. SIAM functions as the single point for the service responsibility acting on behalf of the customer, working with all the suppliers day to day, managing all their performance reports across the board. This lets IT run comparisons, baselines and forward forecasts and have actual experience with the mix of suppliers.

Now the IT department can know which are the troublemaker suppliers, the ones that stopped being innovative, the ones probably not worth the contract extension — or even more important — which companies have been proactive and have released interesting new services that fit the company’s needs.

Creating digital transformation

From a business perspective, SIAM gets all the internal business teams working together and moving forward in support of strategic business outcomes. So the chief technology officer can finally get that legacy critical business application redesigned for the 21st century. The customer relationship department can get the customer relationship management system upgraded and more mobile.

Communications can start properly using social media. Manufacturing finally gets on board the internet of things (IoT) train. And the top millennial hires on the DevOps team can become digital nomads and work remotely from Bali or the Canary Islands instead of headquarters.

All of this can happen without expensive consultants hanging around for months on end.

With best-practice SIAM services, the IT department now has most of the applications, services and data it needs on one plate, with the accuracy and insight only the operational know-how of SIAM can offer. Now the IT design board, IT strategy or even the executive board can regularly take that input to tweak the corporate supplier strategy and build business cases on the go without wasting time, money and business opportunities.

When the company runs flexibly and can make technology changes as circumstances evolve, digital transformation happens. That’s the true power of SIAM.

Contact us to learn more about transparency and control for hybrid IT with SIAM.