What Is SIAM (and Why It’s Important)?

Service Integration and Management (SIAM) is an approach to managing multiple suppliers of business as well as IT services. SIAM integrates them to provide a single, business-facing IT organization. It aims at seamlessly integrating interdependent services from various internal and external service providers into end-to-end services to meet business requirements. The term SIAM was preceded by ‘Service Integration’.

The Benefits of SIAM

The benefits of SIAM to organizations are crystal clear. These are some, but not an exhaustive list of benefits:

1. Better service to end-users
2. More cost-efficiency
3. Increased accountability
4. Enable more flexibility
5. The ability to introduce competitiveness between service providers
6. Development and ownership of intellectual property
7. Greater access to expertise across a wider range of suppliers

SIAM Processes

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.

In your organization, you might have the most common processes already in place. These are the easiest to start with:

1. Incident management
2. Request change management
3. Problem management

Who is SIAM for?

Your organization might have complex IT systems, sourced by many external providers. Let’s say for example your WiFi brakes down, you call the supplier, but they ask you to check with your ISP. Then the blame game starts, and fixing the problem becomes increasingly difficult. Sound familiar? This is just one scenario an organization might looking to adopt a SIAM approach to their organization. You might also have multiple external vendor contracts, some processes of which you want to bring back internally. Or simply you feel your organization’s IT approach needs a new appraoch to catch up with trends in automation, and digitalization. SIAM can help organizations in many ways.

Global SIAM Survey

The yearly SIAM survey is conducted by Scopism about the use of the Service Integration and Management (SIAM). The survey was conducted across 31 countries drawn from different domains, not just IT. Only 49% of the respondents were from the IT domain, and the rest were from consulting, managed services, finance among many others. It was also conducted on large organizations with employees exceeding 10,000 in number as well as small organizations which had less than 100 people.

SIAM and EXIN

Do you want to know more? At EXIN, we understand the need for training and certification about SIAM. Click here for more information about SIAM training and certification programs from EXIN.