Outsourcing, Multiprovider, SIAM – a contract for life. Part 4

Outsourcing, Multiprovider, SIAM - a contract for life. Part 4

SIAM - The effective and efficient way to control a wide variety of suppliers.

How can a client guarantee the control of various suppliers for their own information and communication technology? The best method of choice for this is “SIAM” – Service Integration and Management. A practical school of thought for the efficient handling of tasks that result from a large number of suppliers. SIAM offers, as a whole, a catalog of measures for the management and control of the services provided by the suppliers – “Providers”.

The contract in its life cycle.

Out of a sensible habit, this SIAM outsourcing contract blog is based on the “key stages” of the SIAM – Implementation Roadmap.

  • Discovery & Strategy;
  • Plan & Build;
  • Implement;
  • Run & Improve.

Today we are taking a big leap and dealing with the last, but for all participants most important key stage: “Run & Improve” and then with a recourse to all stages.

In today’s view, “Implement” is already behind us for the time being(!). All the efforts and hardships we took on the way there had a reasonable goal: to bring the desired and agreed services “Up and Running”. All relevant milestones have been completed, all criteria have been met, the acceptance of all services has been granted – we are going into operation!

We are initially in a phase of hypercare. Despite clear assignments in the contract and the specification in the operating manual, the interlocking gears must first be installed and continuously monitored and updated particularly intensively.

Once the operation has been established, it is subject to further changes: the “Improve”. The operation should not only be well-rehearsed and remain so – it should also improve. On the one hand, such improvements can result from potential already identified in the “Plan & Build” stage and the variable need for it, or can only be recognized in “Implement” or “Run”.

Service requirements are subject to change.

However, there is also influence from inside or outside: the requirements for the services will change. Purely quantitatively, there will be more or less performance, the required service quality will change, general and special technical innovations will have to be taken into account and, if necessary, implemented, not least the regulatory-legal environment will change (think of the effects of the General Data Protection Regulation). 

Due to the described need for adaptation, the “original version” of even the best outsourcing contract is beginning to age noticeably. But should or must one accept one’s languishing without action? On no account! Each outsourcing contract can and must provide appropriate “guidelines” for its rejuvenation and updating: clear ways in which the parties to this contract record, agree, implement, operate and document all changes and additions – however small or large they may be. As far as these changes and additions are concerned, the known path must always be adhered to when preventively recording in the contract: Discovery & Strategy, Plan & Build, Implement, Run & Improve.

Contact us if we have aroused your interest with this topic.

Outsourcing, Multiprovider, SIAM – how do I put it on paper? Part 3

Outsourcing, Multiprovider, SIAM - how do I put it on paper? Part 3

SIAM - The effective and efficient way to control a wide variety of suppliers.

How can a client guarantee the control of various suppliers for their own information and communication technology? The best method of choice for this is “SIAM” – Service Integration and Management. A practical school of thought for the efficient handling of tasks that result from a large number of suppliers. SIAM offers, as a whole, a catalog of measures for the management and control of the services provided by the suppliers – “Providers”.

The gradual implementation of SIAM without interfering with existing contracts.

At least from a contractual point of view, the “Discovery & Strategy” phase of a SIAM multi-provider environment to be created means due diligence, if necessary, of existing IT outsourcing contracts with the client.

If a client can’t generally or in a targeted area state any outsourcing contracts as his own, at the key stage “Plan & Build, a SIAM multi-provider environment with an immediate “overall transition”, based on standardized contracts can be drawn up for all planned providers including the service integrators.

It becomes more complex when no direct intervention in existing outsourcing contracts should or can be done, and thus, a complete SIAM implementation is only possible on a certain time axis. The “playground” of the changeover on the time axis is huge and green – all axis lengths and nuances are imaginable. The only certain thing is that there won’t be a “Big Bang”, but rather a continuous process of successive transitions.

The contracts that already exist with a client must then be checked for their compatibility and the ability to be added to a SIAM multi-provider environment, in the worst case passed contract periods that have yet to be covered must also be checked. A model of the chronological sequence of all possible provider transitions towards SIAM should be devised and checked. At the same time, it is advisable to preemptively feel out the willingness of the existing providers to integrate into a clearer and much better controllable SIAM multi-provider environment.

Taking into account the actual "degree of maturity" of all companies involved.

Considering the actual “degree of maturity” of all companies involved – including that of the client himself – old and new roles, processes and committees of IT service management must be thought of and considered. Often the different designation of the same, or the same designation of different things, forms a hurdle that should not be underestimated. Uniform definitions of terms for the client and all providers will then be in great demand.

The gradual implementation of the service integrator on the time axis must be considered and possibly be implemented on the time axis using different models (internal versus hybrid versus external).

In the case described, the step-by-step implementation of a SIAM model can only be achieved through new IT outsourcing contracts to be concluded with all providers over a period of time, or at least additional agreements to the existing contracts.

What should be achieved when? In this case, the contract and the related documentation must offer the necessary flexibility and yet still contain the essential cornerstones and arrangement rights of the client and the “growing” service integrator.

Contact us if this topic has aroused your interest. 

Outsourcing, Multiprovider, SIAM – how do I put it on paper? Part 2

Outsourcing, Multiprovider, SIAM - how do I put it on paper? Part 2

The key stages of a SIAM implementation.

How can a client guarantee the control of various suppliers for their own information and communication technology? The best method of choice for this is “SIAM” – Service Integration and Management. A practical school of thought for the efficient handling of tasks that result from a large number of suppliers. SIAM offers a catalog of measures for the management and control of the services provided by the suppliers – “providers” – as a whole.

In the first part of the blog – Outsourcing, Multiprovider, SIAM – how do I get it on paper? – I presented the “key stages” of a SIAM implementation. To recap:

  • Discovery & Strategy;
  • Plan & Build;
  • implement;
  • Run & Improve.

In this second part, I will examine the contractual consideration of the “service integrator” in more detail. In the SIAM ecosystem, the “service integrator” is, in a certain sense, the central intermediary between the client and the suppliers. He coordinates and controls the various suppliers for the client and is seen as a central element in preventing problems and optimizing the network IT organization.

Key Stage "Discovery & Strategy".

In the key stage “Discovery & Strategy”, the SIAM strategy, the structure of the SIAM model and an overarching framework of SIAM governance should be defined. The planned design of the service integrator should be an essential part of these specifications. In particular, which entity takes on the task of the service integrator. The following ideal types can be represented:

  • Internal service integrator (staff organization of the client)
  • External service integrator (independent service integrator in the sense of a specially commissioned third party)
  • Service integrator located at the most important supplier or even general contractor (lead provider)
  • Hybrid service integrator (mixed form of the options already mentioned)

Key Stage "Plan and Build".

In the “Plan and Build” stage, the outsourcing contract is drawn up, approved by the client for negotiation with the suppliers and finally concluded between all parties involved. The role of the service integrator as a central feature of a SIAM contract model must therefore already be defined in this stage. The rights that the service integrator exercises for the client in managing and monitoring the interaction of all providers are incorporated into almost all parts of the contract and are to be defined as binding obligations for each individual service provider.

If a hybrid or lead provider – service integrator is chosen, a separate part of the outsourcing contract is usually required to define the content clearly. A specific contract should be drawn up for an external service integrator, which is coordinated with and references to the outsourcing contract.

Contact us if this topic has aroused your interest. 

Outsourcing, Multiprovider, SIAM – Contracts in Multi-Provider Environments. Part 1

Contracts in Multi-Provider Environments - Part 1

The handling in a multi-provider environment is a challenge.

The drafting and termination of sourcing contracts and everything in between, in other words how a contract is lived, often leads to challenges for our customers that are not easy to manage. Especially in a multi-provider environment, the handling is not easy and therefore we want to address exactly these challenges in a blog series here.

Companies, especially those that are part of a corporation or group of companies, regularly face the challenges of a multi-provider environment when procuring their ICT (information and communications technology) requirements. 

The experience of the last few decades of “first-generation outsourcing” has taught us that, even the targeted and well-thought-out management of a single supplier requires extensive consideration and structural measures within the company of the client. When the number of suppliers multiplies – i.e., in a multi-provider environment – the demands on the client are inevitably multiplied as well.

How can a client ensure the control of all service providers for its own information and communications technology?

The proven means of choice is “SIAM” – Service Integration and Management. A practical school of thought for the efficient management of tasks arising from a multitude of suppliers. SIAM offers a set of measures for managing and controlling the services provided by the suppliers – “providers” – as a whole.

All the possibilities that SIAM offers, all the considerations and solutions that result from it, do not only manifest themselves in “internal” documents. All of the results are condensed and “externally effective” in a document that not only comprehensively regulates the legal relationship between the customer and the service providers, but also ideally serves as an operating manual for all parties involved in the joint business: the contract document.

The contract as an operating manual.

The contract should contain everything, regulate everything, starting with the signing of the contract in turn, through smooth implementation and ongoing optimization of operations, to the final step – the end of the contract with the “disentanglement”: the disentanglement of the previously established, intimate relationship between the client and the respective provider with regard to the ICT services concerned. At the same time, however, the contract should not contain excessively rigid specifications, should offer scope for adjustments, and should anticipate regulations that can only be sharpened in the course of the implementation phase as a development template.

SIAM envisages four “key stages” for the implementation of multi-provider outsourcing:

  • Discovery & Strategy;
  • Plan & Build;
  • Implement;
  • Run & Improve. 

Although the actual contracting takes place in phase 2 “Plan & Build”, the preparatory work for this should already begin in the initial phase “Discovery and Strategy”. Viewing existing contracts at an early stage and integrating them conceptually into the SIAM planning of the mutual rights and obligations of all parties involved saves time and grief.

In the “Plan & Build” phase, the draft contract is created, specified, and finally approved by the client for the discussions that lead to the conclusion of the deal with all providers. As already explained, the contract finally concluded by all parties involved serves as an operating manual and guide rail for all further phases of the process.

Learn more about interesting legal topics on multi-provider governance in the near future or contact us now if this topic has aroused your interest.

Efficient service delivery through seamless process integration

Efficient service delivery through seamless process integration

Outsourcing of internal services is on the rise again.

The outsourcing of internal services to external providers has increased again in recent years. According to Statista.de, this trend will continue over the next few years. It can also be observed that there is an increase in multisourcing, i.e. the procurement of services from different providers. The control of an average of 13.5 providers (source: 4me) is not rare In larger organizations, this figure often rises to over 100.

The control and integration of external services is still challenging for companies.

The resulting increase in complexity in the control and integration of external services still poses major challenges for companies. For example, the design of contracts, on- and off-boarding of providers, integration of processes and tools, cultural differences, etc. are common issues we encounter with our customers. By applying an appropriate best practice model such as SIAM (Service Integration and Management), an efficient and effective way can be created in such environments in order to make the control seamless and frictionless.

The difficulties with regards to the technical integration of ITSM and source systems, illustrated by the incident process.

One topic that often presents our customers with difficulties is the technical integration of the ITSM and source systems or the processes of the different service providers (even when using tools from the same manufacturer), as well as the internal organizational units. It is often not considered that a seamless integration of these tools or the implemented processes can only be made possible with the appropriate technological support. A striking example is the Incident Process. The Incident Process can vary from customer organization to customer organization and from service provider to service provider. Different definitions of process parameters such as priority and criticality or even the individual process status leads to difficulties regarding seamless integration across organizational boundaries. Another challenge is that the data in the master system must always be kept up-to-date. This requires a flexible interface that feeds data bi-directionally into the respective systems. Finally, a clear and always traceable assignment of responsibility for a ticket in each process stage (ownership management) is indispensable for the end-to-end measurement of SLAs. We often experience that manually developed interfaces are used for this purpose, which are implemented with a lot of effort (on average between 40-50 working days). It is often not considered that a change to a central system also requires a change to the respective interfaces and can therefore also lead to high costs. This is especially true if, for example, the interface of a service provider is accessed, and the change needs to be commissioned separately.

The use of a corresponding ITSM tool independent middleware: Lomnido SIAM-Broker.

One way to solve this elegantly is to use appropriate ITSM tool-independent middleware or an integration platfrom such as the Lomnido SIAM Broker. By using standardized interfaces, normalization of the data stream and transactions, a connection between the respective tools can be established quickly and efficiently, usually with little configuration effort. The installation and configuration effort can be drastically reduced by the upstream connection of a middleware and later adaptations through system changes can be realized without large additional costs. In addition, the communication flow within the SIAM ecosystem is recorded seamlessly and transparently, which, in addition to the associated commitment, also contributes to the cost reduction of each connection over the entire life cycle.

If you need more information or are interested in a demo, please contact us

SIAM Health Assessment

SIAM Health Assessment

Markus Müller: 18 years of experience in conducting assessments.

Markus Müller, who contributed to the development of the SIAM Health Assessment, looks back at 18 years of conducting assessments in various roles, countries and industries. He explains the real advantages he has seen, not simply from glossy brochures, but rather, from experience and insight about what assessments have accomplished for the organizations he has worked for.

The SIAM assessment development team

When Michelle and Simon asked me to join the SIAM assessment development team, it took me about 0.2 milliseconds to answer to the affirmative. I have been part of the SIAM authoring team since the beginning when we worked on developing the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge. Assessments on SIAM competencies are familiar territory for me as I was responsible for SIAM services such as assessment delivery in one of the global consultancies, before moving to a global corporate organization to not only talk about and assess SIAM environments, but to live and breathe it every day in my role as ‘Head of SIAM’.

Last year Gartner attested that the service integrator “…continues to move up the Slope of Enlightenment as client adoption increases”. This means a higher maturity in coordination and integration of hybrid service providers in a services ecosystem is required.

Coordination and facilitation between suppliers work best when based on well understood dynamics, dependencies and connections. Having factual information about the state of the environment gathered from quality data sources is fundamental to this. Gathering information that is based on data supports informed decisions about what the roadmap to design, implement and run a SIAM environment should look like for a specific organization, is exactly what a SIAM assessment can do for that organization. 

A holistic approach which takes all components into account.

Before I explain what is outstanding about our SIAM assessment, I would like to summarize what I did not like about classic assessments:

It was clear that we did not want to repeat one-dimensional patterns, such as evaluating only the integrator’s ability to manage processes. For us, it has to be a holistic approach that takes into account all the components that make up excellent management practices. A SIAM assessment is unlikely to achieve its goal by looking at a single company in isolation. However, most assessments focus only on one organization, but not on the entire supply chain. In our SIAM Assessment, we`re talking about the progress of a SIAM ecosystem.

And if we then focus only on whether a particular practice is evident or not, we are in old-school territory. The classic yes/no questions usually don’t do justice to the complexity of many multi-provider management challenges today. You wouldn’t believe how many different discussions can arise around a single question. If the questions are not easy to understand and to the point, we risk negative feedback, as assessment participants could easily get the feeling that their valuable time is not well invested. Instead, the questions that are asked must be open-ended and enrich the participants’ thinking as well as implicitly convey know-how.

We had proprietary SIAM assessments in some places already. However, those concentrated mainly on just readiness aspects.

Our SIAM Assessment will be meaningful, no matter if you`re just starting to develop your SIAM Ecosystem, if you`re in the middle of the transition and need a checkpoint or if you`d like to retrospectively demonstrate progress and improvements made.

A quality assessment that is built on the best practice guidance from the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge, provides a baseline to be able to track an organization’s SIAM status.

It is an old saying, but a true one, that we must first understand the baseline from which we are starting before we can understand how to get to where we want to be. An assessment helps reduce risk in the early stages of transformation planning, for both the integrator and the customer organization, and experience suggests that this effort pays dividends when determining progress toward a defined vision for the customer organization.

Speaking of strategy, I personally find that the assessments I’ve led in the past have contributed positively towards sorting through various stakeholder opinions and helps to establish some clear priorities for improvement.

Check your own progress using the SIAM health assessment.

The SIAM assessment that we have developed will prioritize activities within an improvement approach based on the best practice guidance within the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge. This supports improvement across the key practice areas, people, process, tools, measurement and governance and strategy, so it really does provide for a holistic review and improvement planning initiative.

There is another important element that I have always found valuable about assessments: By checking an organization’s current practice against the documented practices in the SIAM BoKs, we can assure that these good practices provide the guardrails to elevate the organization to the next level of maturity without having to reinvent the wheel. The SIAM guidance is based on real world experience, with contribution of over 40 SIAM practitioners from across the globe.  An assessment can truly help an organization understand how well it is functioning and how the incorporation of service integration is enabling business benefit for the customer.

The ability to benchmark against known success factors for a SIAM environment, and the ability for an organization to review its own progress is what we hoped to achieve with the SIAM Health Assessment, and it is in my view that this can be a strategic asset when used in this way.

My consultant colleagues may not all agree with assessments and indeed, our development team had much debate about what we wanted to create and what we didn’t. The achievement of a ‘maturity level’ or ‘number’ was definitely not what we wanted. Our focus was on creating a tool that could be used to plan for improvements, wherever a customer organization was in their SIAM journey.

One of the great benefits of our assessment is that it can be done quickly and simply as a ‘DIY’ of self-assessment to get a baseline of health very quickly. If a deeper dive, consultant led assessment is required, this is possible too. The well-conceived questioning approach allows a guided assessment and expertise from the consultant to create a much more thorough review and improvement plan.

Both options work well depending on what an organization is hoping to achieve. In my view, the self-assessment effort has always paid off in advance of an external assessment to scale the external assessment so that not all areas need to be assessed in a 360-degree lengthy manner, but the level of detail of the assessment of individual SIAM competencies can be adjusted to the results that the self-assessment brought to light.

The organization that I currently work for uses assessments for many of the reasons I have mentioned here. However, there is one more good reason; by undertaking periodic assessments you can really track improvements. The nature of a SIAM ecosystem requires a customer organization`s governance, risk and compliance function to assure internal and external standards are being followed and good practices are developed and executed consistently across the SIAM ecosystem against these standards. Having an ongoing assessment can really help to achieve this and execute on corporate assurance responsibilities in context of governance, risk and compliance.

I personally see the benefits when talking to internal and external auditors who also compare what we do within our SIAM ecosystem against other industry practices such as COBIT. The section about COBIT and SIAM in our BoKs (see Professional BoK section 2.3.3) explains more about how close both are in terms of principles, framework, and management practices.

I am delighted to have contributed to developing this SIAM Health Assessment. It is a true example of community contribution, making our insight and knowledge accessible and truly ‘walking the talk’ for our industry!

Blueponte anniversary: 2 years, 1 week.

We launched Blueponte 2 years ago.

Yes, it has been two years and one week since we’ve founded Blueponte. We’d like to take this occasion to say „thank you” to all of you who noticed last week and congratulated us.

All journeys start with the first step, so did ours. A little more than 3 years ago, over business breakfast and coffee meetings, we realized that we had to join forces and make the world a better place with our services, and a management model called SIAM, still very unknown in Austria. On our best practice study trip to England, Lorenz and Ronald met our third founder, Markus. After a few meetings and lunches, it was clear to us that we would do business together. We left England knowing that our founding team was complete. That was exactly 2 years and one week ago.

Ja genau vor zwei Jahren 

 

What should our company look like and how do we make it successful?

Such questions, and many more, preoccupied us very intensively at the beginning. And do that for us today. We answered the most important question right from the start: our drive for this entrepreneurial step, our “why” so to speak. Our luck was certainly the large overlap that we could see in this exercise. Working intensively on this at the beginning of our cooperation has since helped us immensely to resolve conflicts or not to let them become such in the first place. Not to mention the speed at which we were able to make some decisions. The fun factor should not go unmentioned, which is very important to us. But that’s also because we all just love each other.

The first order.

It is well known that every beginning is difficult, and so the beginning was also very challenging for us. How do we get our first customer? We soon had our first portfolio together and were able to attend our first customer appointments. The response was very positive from the start, but sales have not yet been successful. What now? From social media campaigns, live events to community events, there was hardly anything we left out. And yet, winning customers for an order was not that easy. Or was it our portfolio? Our story, which we told? Or did we imagine it all too simple? No matter what it was, at some point the time came when we had to convince a customer … no matter the cost. The effort was doubled, the number of events and phone calls attended increased … and lo and behold, our first customer was “suddenly” there.

From then on, 3 months had passed since we were founded, the spell was broken and the next customer orders followed. Everything went very well. And then there was Corona and the first lockdown.

Then came Covid.

Despite all the difficulties such as home schooling, travel and contact restrictions, and uncertainties about the continuation of customer orders, it has been shown that technological progress makes collaboration in the virtual space possible and is far more efficient than originally thought. As a young company, we learned a lot about the possibilities of virtual collaboration in this phase, and thus also the opportunity that offers us to scale and further develop our vision.

After the worst was over, we fully devoted ourselves to our mission and the goal of developing Blueponte into a company that supports many customers with their service integration, outsourcing, provider management and everything that goes with it.

No sooner said than done, we were able to welcome reinforcements to the team very soon. With our new colleagues, we were finally able to implement a lot of things that have so far been neglected due to time constraints. Over time, our vision has become more vivid and concrete, and it still is today. We look to a great future and are electrified by the new customers, future collaborations and, above all, other employees who enrich our team.

As an interim conclusion, one can only say that the last 2 years have been an extremely exciting, challenging and, above all, enriching journey for us. We met a lot of new people. We are grateful that we were able to work with you and are now more convinced than ever that we are on exactly the right track. We look forward to our future and to continuing to pursue our mission: Bringing Trust to IT Sourcing. SIAM at it’s best.

What is a “Service Manager On-Demand”?

What is a "Service Manager On-Demand"?

Our service offer "Service Manager On-Demand"

With our “Service Manager On-Demand” range of services, we support our customers in strategic and operational IT service management. We are at your side with advice and also intervene operationally in what is happening. Among other things, we manage the IT service providers and take on tasks and responsibilities.

"Service Manager On-Demand" as a service.

In our discussions with potential customers on the subject of Service Manager On-Demand or “(anything) as a Service”, we always meet with great interest. The request “Please send me your résumé” almost always comes up. This shows us that services in this area are still assigned to a specific person, while it is already common practice in other industries to actually understand a service as a service and to use it as such.

Where? Since it’s summer time, let’s just take a family’s vacation trip to Mallorca as a comparative example. Nobody comes up with the idea of ​​asking about the résumé of the pilot or co-pilot or asking for the aircraft’s logbook. Although these are safety-related factors on the trip, you rarely get to see the pilots. They can only be heard during the announcement of the greeting or during the interim report of the flight with regard to the remaining flight time, the flight altitude and the weather situation. Such announcements do not allow any conclusions to be drawn about the training, experience and quality of the pilots.

Service "as a Service" based on air travel as an example.

We all simply assume that the entire system, which is necessary for the service, is set up optimally and therefore works without friction. So this means that we trust that the pilot and the co-pilot are perfectly trained, both for flying itself and for the specific aircraft, the machine itself. Our assumption goes further: we assume that both pilots successfully complete the regular medical and psychological examinations. They also have the necessary experience – both for the machine and for all take-off and landing maneuvers at different airports. We also assume that the board staff are well trained in dealing with passengers, are always polite, friendly and are always ready to help in fulfilling customer requests. The plane is cleaned. The drinks and food for the trips are fresh and tasty. The aircraft is of course professionally maintained and has enough fuel both for the journey and for any incidents such as holding patterns. The maintenance technicians have the necessary training and the appropriate authorizations to maintain the aircraft, and the prescribed maintenance intervals are observed. The air traffic controllers in the individual countries on the way to Mallorca are also well trained, rested and accordingly attentive. The technical systems for air traffic control are all well maintained, ready for use and safe from any hacker attacks. The flight planning is done, the flight plans approved and the slots for the take-offs allocated accordingly. The individual security precautions at the airport are coordinated and protect against possible hazards. Of course, the passengers are also continuously checked for valid negative COVID tests. You can go on and on with this list.

A service that is basically easy to acquire, the Vienna-Mallorca flight, contains a multitude of complex, interwoven services. We, the passengers, only value the SLAs – the flight times – and the price. In doing so, we trust that all of what we have listed above is fulfilled.

We take care of the provision of the service "as a Service".

It is the same with the topic “… as a service”. We – Blueponte – take care of the professional, certified training, the timely provision of the service, the corresponding back office and everything necessary to deliver the defined scope of services. From now on you no longer have to ask for résumés, screen them and take action yourself, but can embark on a high-quality IT service journey with us.

Case Study ABB: The SIAM journey to global networked IT

Case Study ABB: The SIAM journey to a global networked IT.

A field report from the SIAM Body of Knowledge co-Autor

Markus Müller, Blueponte Co-Founder and Corporate Information Systems GRC Experience Manager at ABB writes about the journey to global IT at ABB. A field report by the SIAM Body of Knowledge co-author, who combines practice with theory, as we like to practice at Blueponte.

Digitale Transformation has catalyzed ways of working.

The digital transformation has catalyzed a rewrite of the rules and changes in working methods. In the last two to three years, deficiencies in consistent IT work methods have also been uncovered in Austria. These shortcomings are gradually being remedied.

Existing, “pure” agile projects are now grounded in the facts. We keep seeing DevSecOps approached like a technology project. That is not the last word, because it is more about changing the corporate culture. Tactical successes are achieved in many places, but if they are not orchestrated as part of an end-to-end solution, they can restrict the supply of IT services and create additional costs and complexity for the organization. The focus has to be bigger and this is exactly where Service Integration and Management (SIAM) offers an answer to what is often simply referred to as “digitization”. A little more than a third of the top 25 companies for 2020 in the Gartner ranking have redefined their operating models in recent years. They did this to provide the required end-to-end ability to manage distributed services. Among them is the ABB Group, which I have been accompanying on the SIAM journey for six years now.

Improve collaboration between business organizations.

I focus in my work on how we can work better and how we can improve the cooperation between the different business organizations, which all have their own IT, and the global business IT organization. ABB’s IT has evolved from a centralized, more monolithic approach with a classic separation between infrastructure and applications to a flexible organization with a multi-sourcing approach and is now moving to federal governance.

In retrospect, I can now ask myself what I would have done differently with today’s knowledge six years ago when I started at ABB, when I accepted the assignment to set up a global SIAM organization.

I am very proud to have accompanied ABB on an exciting and instructive SIAM transformation journey over the past few years. And I am convinced that the company’s IT organization is perfectly positioned to take advantage of its new operating model. We built the IT organization on SIAM principles and practices, and although we are still in the transition phase, I can name several key key questions that need to be answered in order to embed the new ways of working in our daily work.

The factors of success.

The success factors include:

  1. Is there a vision for SIAM?
  2. How strong is the tower mentality or the silo thinking within the organization?
  3. Are there robust frameworks built on industry best practices?
  4. Is there enough maturity to build trusting relationships with suppliers?
  5. Does the organization value agile organizational changes?
  6. Is there a culture of collaborative thinking to drive the overall value proposition of IT?
  7. Does the organization have a history of iterative approaches to implementing SIAM competencies?
  8. What do contracts and cooperation agreements look like, is the organization used to dealing with formal guidelines?
  9. Is there a culture or ambition for what we call the end-to-end ownership mentality in SIAM?

If I think back to 2015 and try to answer these questions from the perspective of that time, it becomes clear in retrospect how big the challenge was, because apart from questions 1 and 5 there were no clear answers at that time. Taking on the challenge anyway made our personal SIAM trip at ABB even more interesting and appealing than SIAM projects already are.

These nine questions are the most important questions I would ask today before accepting a job as a leader in a SIAM organization.

In my next post, you can find out why this is the case, which will be online next week. Follow us on LinkedIn to not miss a blog entry.

Case Study ABB: The SIAM Vision

Case Study ABB: The SIAM Vision

A field report from the SIAM Body of Knowledge co-author.

Markus Müller, Blueponte Co-Founder and Corporate Information Systems GRC Experience Manager at ABB writes about the journey to global IT at ABB. A field report by the SIAM Body of Knowledge co-author, who combines practice with theory, as we like to practice at Blueponte.

A vision conveys a long-term view.

Today I would like to write on the subject of “SIAM Vision”. Perhaps you will now think that visions are more esoteric. That may be true, but managers also need the creativity to describe their mission statement for the ideal state of the organization with a crisp statement. This has many advantages, for example a vision can show what a service integration function has to offer. A vision conveys a long-term view that describes how we would like to see our surroundings and ourselves in them. It shows the employees the meaning and describes the bigger picture of a desired target state.

And good visions also implicitly contain the value contribution of the organization. This gives you a direction with which the members of the organization, in this case the employees of a service integrator, can identify.

I worked on the vision with my management team in several workshops. In retrospect, this work was very valuable. We agreed that the fewer words the vision statement has, the better. We found this out simply by discussing the statements of larger companies, which from our point of view were very successful.

We finally came to the following statement for our SIAM organization: “We are the global conductors of integrated service operations”

Since I appreciate classical music very much and never miss an opportunity to be present at rehearsals with large orchestras with their conductor, I have been able to study the interactions between conductor and orchestra over and over again. I found many of them fascinating, because the way in which successful conductors deal with the individual groups in the orchestra is neither based on a relationship that one calls “the conductor is the king” or “the conductor is the supplicant” could. Rather, I had the impression that they were treated very respectfully on an equal footing. Conductors like to describe what they would like to hear from the musicians in a very graphic way.

At the time, I took this as a model to describe the ideal state in which managers at the integrator should best talk to the managers at the service providers.

 

The conductor with his orchestra.

I chose the familiar image of how a conductor interacts with the orchestra in order to make the employees in my organization understand what we stand for as integrators and what justifies our existence. It is easy to understand what a network department or a hosting tower does in an IT organization. What an integrator does is not that easy to understand. That is why we were certainly seen like a foreign body in ABB’s IT environment at the time.

If I had only described this in many PowerPoint slides, we would never have gotten any further. We made real progress in dealing with us as integrators and the many service providers when we really exemplified SIAM in the way we dealt with everyone.

Originally I wanted to find a caricature in which the conductor looks at the orchestra and all the musicians have their backs to the conductor, because that was actually the situation I was in when the journey began.

How did we finally turn the tide? In retrospect, I am convinced that the visual part of our vision contributed to this. I could have woken everyone in my team at some point during the night to ask about the vision and they would have told me who we are without hesitation: “global conductors of integrated service operations”.

Ideally, a vision should be self-explanatory. Nevertheless, I kept referring to it at larger events, e.g. when it came to communicating our SIAM strategy and our annual planning.

Two essential things.

Two things have turned out to be essential:

  • We are there to keep the complexity of our supplier environment away from our customers so that the customers perceive an IT organization that is as coherent as possible without having to worry about the underlying networks of IT services.
  • We are the function that drives the global standardization of processes and procedures in order to make operations as transparent, efficient and simple as possible.

Working out a vision in a team and creating it first for the team and then later for everyone else, that made communication about what I wanted to achieve a lot easier in retrospect. It pulled people in the same direction and gave their work more meaning.

Would you also like to reduce the complexity in your company and align your IT organization to SIAM? Contact us, we are pleased to help you.