‘SIAM’ may have once conjured up visions of Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr butting heads and then dancing in The King and I, but that movie is nearly 70 years old, and the country has been called Thailand since 1939. Nowadays, SIAM is much more likely to be used as the acronym for ‘Service Integration and Management’.
“Essentially, it’s a framework that helps organisations to provide a level of management and governance of their connected ecosystem of suppliers, processes, policies and delivery,” explains Dan Marsh, Head of ServiceNow at AC3.
SIAM enables a consistent set of processes, policies and technology with a major focus on trying to drive governance, management of performance and continual improvement in how a business executes its outcomes or the processes it utilises to achieve those outcomes.
In any organisation there are generally two ways in which SIAM is executed, says Marsh. Sometimes, it’s through an internal service integration team within the organisation as a retained function, with a senior leader steering the ship, and a team of operations managers and process managers looking after the processes that enable delivery.
The alternative is via an outsourced service provider with service integration capability, providing SIAM governance on behalf of the organisation. In either case, the goal remains the same – to improve the performance, delivery and execution of how the ITSM processes are engaged, and also how it truly supports the organisation to deliver optimal outcomes for employees and the people they serve.
One platform that can assist with the effectiveness of SIAM is ServiceNow, as it features a raft of capabilities designed to support the governance aspects of delivering efficient processes. Based in the cloud, ServiceNow has been the market leader for IT service management for over six years, but is expanding exponentially, says Marsh, to further mature the ways in which organisations adopt the platform outside of IT Service Management.
“ServiceNow is a broad ecosystem of capabilities aimed at digitising work,” explains Marsh. “It enables the ability to report on KPIs and metrics, whether it be for particular teams, processes or service partners.
“It really drives that integrated ecosystem so that the flow of work between different teams is executed and orchestrated effectively, and the customer gets the outcome they need.”
There are several key features that facilitate this and the core one is the IT service management suite. This suite includes all the standardised item processes: incident, problem and knowledge management; change request fulfillment; continual improvement and asset management.
“Each of these capabilities has its own module, the ability to support the delivery of processes across the organisation and a raft of different plugins that support the level of maturity a SIAM framework demands,” says Marsh. “And over time each process is essentially continually improved.”
One of the biggest factors in ServiceNow is the common service data model (CSDM), which is built on the foundation of a very strong integrated foundational platform. The CSDM provides a framework and guidance on how capabilities, data and processes integrate to truly mature operational delivery, from which any SIAM organisation can benefit.
“This really helps to map the relationships between technical components, business processes and business services... to bridge the gap between the business and IT, and bring that business lens to your technical data.”
Some of ServiceNow’s key platform capabilities that complement SIAM delivery include Vendor Management Workspace, ITOM (IT operations management) Discovery and Service Mapping, Integrated Risk Management (ServiceNow’s governance, risk management and compliance [GRC] capabilities) and Integration Hub.
For organisations looking to participate in ServiceNow integration, there are a few operating models to choose from, reveals Marsh. They could be incorporated into the ServiceNow platform, which means the service partners operate on the customer’s platform, or they could be integrated into the platform, in which case the customer will define and govern the process and determine the rules of engagement, spelling out the compliance objective.
Managing a SIAM framework, an organisation has processes and policies to which it must adhere, but also contractual compliance. ServiceNow’s GRC capabilities provide the ability to track risks, assign them to delivery teams and enable the remediation of those risks.