SIAM – An attractive concept fraught with real-world challenges

The Service Integration and Management i.e. SIAM model is by no means a new concept and has become increasingly popular, in one variation or another, over the last few years. SIAM is the function/capability put in place to manage multiple IT suppliers, and potentially internal functions, and integrate their services to deliver a seamless end-to-end service to the business.

The theory behind SIAM is that by establishing a standard set of processes, tools, metrics and contract mechanisms, you can allow for the ‘plug and play’ removal and addition of different so called Tower suppliers. These are the suppliers who provide the underlying IT services (e.g. end user computing, networks, hosting, application management etc.) and deliver coherent end-to-end business services. However in our experience, an effective SIAM model is not easy to implement and very few truly successful examples have emerged.

This paper (first in a series of three) explores the basic components and structure of a SIAM model, different options for delivering a SIAM function in an organisation and what aspects of the model an organisation needs to design before attempting to build/source a SIAM function.