In any enterprise, there is a growing urge to outsource more and more IT services to third-party service providers. Service Integration and Management (SIAM) allows multiple services to be managed the way the user needs. SIAM is having an impact everywhere: finance, consultancy, government, education, manufacturing, telecoms, health, energy, logistics, and of course IT.

24 SIAM Processes

As professionals in these lines of work know, SIAM itself is not a process. It draws on and uses other management processes. In the SIAM Foundation Body of Knowledge by SCOPISM, 24 processes associated with SIAM are listed:

1. Audit and control
2. Business relationship management
3. Change management
4. Release management
5. Commercial/contract management
6. Continual improvement
7. Event management
8. Financial management
9. Incident management
10. Request fulfilment
11. Service catalog management
12. Information security management
13. Knowledge management
14. Monitoring, measuring, and reporting
15. Problem management
16. Project management
17. Software asset and configuration management
18. Service level management
19. Service portfolio management
20. Supplier management
21. Toolset and information management
22. Capacity and availability management
23. Service continuity management
24. Service introduction, retirement, and replacement

All processes have their place in your SIAM strategy, but the best processes to start with are:

1. Incident management
2. Change management
3. Problem management

An incident is a process that allows service consumers to raise an issue if there is a deficiency in the service delivered to them. A request is a description of the planned work to be requested by the consumer of a service. When an issue is not resolved, it is escalated as a problem so that specialists can resolve the issue. Lastly, any changes to be made in the services has to be done through a change request.

SIAM as a Service

Arising from the above scenario, there are service vendors who are offering SIAM as a service to their customers. Some of the service providers have taken this as an opportunity to define a new service of managing a multitude of service consumers and vendors. The need for SIAM is being felt as the organizations are going in for total outsourcing, not just from a single vendor but from multiple vendors, to reduce the risk of doing all outsourcing to a single vendor.

SIAM Training and Certification

These new trends lead to a need for training and certification about SIAM. Formal training and testing for an organizations’ employees would help them more efficiently manage these processes to help meet the organization’s goals more efficiently. Click here for more information about SIAM training and certification program from EXIN, BCS and SCOPISM.