SIAM

SIAM (Service Integration and Management) is a set of practices that help organizations govern, integrate and coordinate their service providers to get the most value from them.

A SIAM ecosystem has the following layers:

• Customer organization. The organization that is moving to a SIAM model. Customer organizations typically have business units such as HR, finance, sales and in-house IT staff. They also have their own customers who use their products and services.
• Service integrator. This layer ensures that every service provider contributes to end-to-end service delivery. The service integrator role can be performed by one or more organizations, including the customer organization itself.
• External or internal service providers. Each provider is responsible for delivering one or more services (or service elements) to the customer. Providers are responsible for managing the products and technologies used to deliver the contracted or agreed services, as well as for managing their own processes.

Service integration and management helps bring together the tools an organization uses to manage relationships with customers, suppliers, the supply chain and the team. As a result, the services, the technologies behind them and the processes used to deliver them come together into a single operating model.

SIAM practice has two parts:

• Commercial: supplier selection, contracting, procurement, invoicing, performance evaluation and so on. This part can be seen as the foundation of the SIAM concept.
• Integration: coordinating supplier services, which covers three sub-layers: project and service quality management, change coordination, and standardization of supplier interactions.

Key benefits of SIAM:

• Lowers the internal cost of managing cloud and legacy IT services.
• Reduces the risk and cost of integrating services from multiple providers.
• Provides control and governance over the cloud services ecosystem.
• Enables end-to-end management of business IT services.
• Brings skills and expertise that strengthen the internal IT management function.

To put SIAM principles into practice, organizations use ITIL, which covers the entire IT service lifecycle and is familiar to most service providers.