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Some Food for Thought:

Why Achieving
Multi-Provider
Service Harmony
Is No Trivial Task
What s Inside
Service excellence doesn t care about
service complexity

Avoiding the Watermelon Eect.

A glimpse into the Gold Standard SIAM function

Service Excellence Doesn't Care about Service Complexity
Have you ever experienced a Michelin starred restaurant? As it happened, the other day at an important client dinner at a
very famous restaurant in London, I was thoroughly impressed by the swiftness, presentation, quality and sheer
seamlessness with which a great variety of food was delivered to a very heterogeneous group of people. At the end of it,
there wasn t one soul at the table who didn t leave without a smile on his or her face. It wasn t just dinner; it was an
experience.

Creating such an experience takes much more than talent and hard work. It takes clear lines of control, teamwork and most
of all, it involves the implementation of a very mature service management framework. Imagine a busy kitchen, buzzing
with a dozen chefs. Each specializes in a dierent kind of food--or even parts of the food preparation process--while
managing scores of orders in parallel. Now relate this back to the expectation of the customer sitting impatiently in the
restaurant, expecting a Michelin starred experience at the table, while oblivious to the complexity between the chefs, the
service sta and the various suppliers involved, you might realize that the art of cooking is just one part of the Foie Gras
you consume. In fact, cooking is a well-dened process framework with rules, a clear understanding of each service
owner's strengths and weaknesses, and a restaurant manager whose job it is to orchestrate all this into the desired
experience, delivered every time, and without any scope of error.

If you are in IT, or are a part of the business which depends on IT services, it will not be a stretch for you to realize that a
similar weight of customer expectations is on your product or service. Much like a customer at a famous restaurant, your
customer is oblivious to the hundreds of cog-wheels in your machine, each performing its own function to the highest
eciency and quality. More importantly, each must be working in perfect harmony together to deliver the desired end
experience. For example, every time a shopper clicks the Buy Now button on your website, she expects that her coveted
purchase is delivered to her door as per the SLA she paid for. She doesn t care that that the delivery requires the
harmonious execution of 10 dierent processes and ve dierent functions from IT to warehousing, supply chain and
nance. And if any of those processes or functions are outsourced, then we are looking at a multi-dimensional,
multi-service, multi-SLA management challenge that requires skills not too dierent from the manager at a Michelin
starred restaurant.

This is why SIAM (Service Integration and Management) has been consistently named as a top IT and business service
related challenge time and again in various reports and studies. One reason for SIAM s rise in importance is that high
performance organizations are heterogeneous at their core, consuming best of breed services from vendors they
painstakingly select and manage.

In simple terms Service

integration and management
(SIAM) is an approach to
managing multiple suppliers of
information technology services
and integrating them to deliver a
unied business-facing IT
organization.

In this sense, "service management" refers to managing the service life cycle all the way from strategy to transition, and to
operation and improvement. The "service integration" piece is what binds together multiple service providers, streamlining
multiple processes and tools to deliver a cohesive service working as a single unit.
 The growing trend of organizations sourcing services from an
expanding number of suppliers is akin to a restaurant managing its
employees. As chefs, servers, cleaning crews, etc have their individual
skillsets and ways of working, they jointly aim to provide to customers
the nest food and customer experience possible--as governed by the
restaurateur. Similarly, organizations may follow their own processes,
but still have to deliver discrete individual components (servers,
storage, network, etc.) to support and deliver an end to end service
based on an agreed SLA to achieve a common purpose.

Service integration and Management lets an organisation manage multiple service providers in a
consistent and efficient way, ensuring that performance across a portfolio of multisourced goods and
services are delivered as a seamless service and meet user needs

Service Integration Service Management

Enabled BY
SI is the binding together of multiple suppliers
by joining up processes and managing the
disparate organisations to function as a single
IT Team to deliver a common service
ITSM is driven by the ITIL framework.
Considered as the standard; these are
processes used to manage operations and the
service lifecycle

Manage Enabled by
SIAM Function or
SMO Process Tools

Operated by

Process operation Roles

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) best practices

and guidelines form the basic foundation of any SIAM function. But
inherent to ITIL are certain limitations i.e. the guidelines only tell
you the principles and best practices for processes, but leave out the
how part. To be successful and eective, IT Service Management
(ITSM) needs more than ITIL; it needs an implementable framework
that expands ITIL guidelines to include others (such as COBIT and
CMM) to make ITSM practical in real-world scenarios. Implementable
ITSM also needs a strong technology platform, and the right skills
and partnerships congure and manage the ITSM tools. Finally,
successful SIAM implementations, much like a Michelin restaurant,
needs an organization responsible for coordination, management,
end-to-end service reporting, driving innovation. This is known as
the "Service Management Oce." In fact, today the prevalent trend is
to outsource the SIAM function to capable Service Integrators (SIs)
who bring with them implementable ITSM frameworks and the
required technology expertise to create, run and manage successful
SIAM implementations.

Achieving service excellence through multi-provider harmony isn t a

trivial task, as SIAM requires focused investment, execution and
control. It requires multiple individuals, parties and organizations to
be aligned to a single goal while doing what they do best, and in
the best possible way. It requires the focus to shift from the creation
of complexity to the consumption of simplicity. If this sounds like no
mean task, bringing a smile to a customer's face never is; just ask the
manager at any Michelin-starred restaurant.
Avoiding the
Watermelon Eect.
Are 100% of IT SLAs green, but your business still sees red?
The solution could lie in implementing successful SIAM.

While SIAM is not a new concept, the current pace at which

the IT landscape is changing has brought it to the top of a

CIO s or business manager s list of priorities. As businesses

depend more and more on IT delivering on or even exceeding

the promise of technology, the demands placed on IT

mandate the leverage of best-of-breed suppliers. Similarly,

Service Management has evolved from a stage where the

challenge was integrating the retained organization and the

single, large supplier, to todays challenges of much higher

magnitude that require the integration and management of

multiple vendors and a complex mix of services.

Understanding the Challenges of Successfully
Implementing SIAM
Bringing together multiple suppliers, each with their own style of working,
processes, tools etc. and molding them into one cohesive service is not
a walk in the park.

A few challenges that organizations face

while implementing SIAM function are:

Complex supplier to supplier accountabilities:

The services and the criticality of a supplier in the service value
chain decides the accountabilities and the roles. Since very clear
accountabilities between dierent suppliers is dicult to
achieve, especially in today s dynamic, complex and often-times
cloud based IT environment, this becomes one of the major
challenges while implementing SIAM.

Dierent SLA s mean dierent measuring tapes:

Contract terms and SLAs agreed with suppliers are more unique
than similar, rendering a one size ts all kind of service level
measurement unworkable. Complexities to be considered can
range from dierent incident priority matrices to something as
basic as dierent contracted hours and even currencies!

Dierence in organizational culture of suppliers:

A business issue resulting from a complex service value-chain
needs to be resolved even if not within the scope of the
contract. This can, for some suppliers, mean getting into long
contract change discussions. Successful SIAM requires an open
collaborative culture where suppliers act responsibly and do all
they can to support the customer, even if it is something which
hasn t been specically included within the contractual scope.

There can be several other challenges in implementing successful

SIAM, such as:
Data transfer issues between suppliers due to dierent tools and processes
being used
Reduced collaboration due to dierent physical locations, languages and time
zones
Dierences in delivery models (some using shared sta, others a dedicated
team, etc.)
Dierent incentives to transform, improve and innovate
Creating an Eective SIAM Function
The SIAM function, which is enabled through a combination of processes and tools, is executed by a human
workforce and usually assisted by automation. As we had seen through the example of the Michelin starred
restaurant and the challenges enumerated in the previous section, creating a seamless multi-vendor organization
is easier said than done. But as scores successful high-performing organizations can testify, it is dicult but not
impossible. We distilled the key elements of eective SIAM from more than twenty such successful
implementations to give the user a perspective of what it takes to build eective SIAM.

The key elements which need to be dened and implemented when building a SIAM function are:

Service Management Processes & Tools

The service management processes and tools deployed to enforce, support and enable the SIAM function form
the foundation of managing operations and integrating multiple suppliers to align them towards ONE single
process goal.

There can be three dierent use cases to consider while deciding on the SIAM processes and tools:

One common ITSM framework (tool + process): This is the most ideal scenario where the supplier and the
service integrators use the same ITSM tool and follow the same process guidelines, hence doing away with the
need to dene additional ways of working together.

Supplier brings tools and process to the table: Alternately some suppliers may use their own ITSM tool and
processes. In this case, the proper workows would need to be dened, agreed upon and implemented.
Unfortunately, this is not an Unfortunately, this is a common scenario and denitely not a preferred option as
this would mean that all the various ITSM tools being used in the SIAM environment would have to be
integrated to talk to each other. This in turn could require complex and laborious data transformation and
consolidation to enable consistent and understandable ow of information.

Swivel: This is commonly used when suppliers criticality in the service chain is low. Here, a manual swivel chair
approach integration is used (i.e. tickets can be keyed into two tools manually, and the ticket numbers entered
into the tools provide an end-to-end audit trail).

The discerning reader would have guessed by now that in reality, typical multi-supplier environments combine
the best of the above three scenarios where the kind of tools and processes being used depend upon the
criticality of the supplier in such an environment. This is a viable approach to SIAM, which ensures that
investments are directed towards the most critical services and suppliers rst.
Service Management Architecture

As in all complex undertakings, the devil lies in the details and this is where organizations fail to
notice the smaller cogs that make up for a well-oiled SIAM function. Details such as factors related to
the data important for each process, security and compliance, access and user prole management,
cost chargebacks, etc., can all impact the architecture and design of the SIAM function. Additionally,
the service management solution should be robust enough to be able to cater to these requirements.

Service Maps

While typical Conguration Management Databases (CMDB) provide a route map for service delivery
components (CI s) and their interrelationships, to understand the impact of these services on business
requires that this mapping is extended to the service and process layers. This helps cover additional
attributes to support the SIAM organization (eg the SLA, the criticality, the vendor supporting the CI,
their support hours, etc). These service maps form a critical component for implementation especially
if the SIAM function is being provided by an external supplier, as they may not have adequate
visibility or the understanding of the complexities and inter-dependencies of the prevalent
environment.

Functional Structure

This is the organization that needs to be designed and put in place to run the SIAM function. Factors
such as scale and complexity of the services landscape, and the locations of the service providers and
the consumer of the services need to be considered while guring out the SIAM organization. The
other important consideration is that of internal-external mix. Making smart decisions on how much
of the organization needs to be retained vs. what needs to be outsourced to capable SIs will
determine the eventual success and ramp-up speed of the SIAM function.

Contract Structure

The truth of the matter is that suppliers are rarely contracted for business outcomes; instead their
SLAs only cover their area of responsibility as captured by their contracts. So who owns the SLA on
business outcome? This disconnect leads to fragmentation of responsibility, eventually leading to lack
of accountability for business performance. This can be changed by dening clear Operating Level
Agreements (OLAs) as a part of the ITSM implementation, and ensuring that internal and external
services providers are all aware of--and align their SLAs to--the overall OLAs. Here are a few other
steps you can take to ensure business accountability:

Capture inter-supplier dependencies very clearly in your OLAs while doing any ITIL implementation.
Incentivize good behavior and foster a culture of collaboration and innovation between suppliers.
Ensure that the ball is not dropped when an issue is handed over to another supplier for resolution
by including generic dependencies between suppliers in your contract.
Conceptual Structure of Key Components in a Best-Practice OLA

Operating-Level Agreement

Service Integration End-to-End Service

Business Context Annexures and Schedules
and Management Commitments

Technology Environment
Introduction Service Desk Coordination Governance
and Standards

Service Operation Technology Environment OLA Change Management

OLA Purpose and Objectives
Management and Standards and Implementation

Shared Values and Common Performance Management End-to-End Service Levels Common Operating Process
Operating Principles and Reporting and OLOs Documentation

Overarching Role of Service Knowledge Toolsets and Messaging

Incentive and Penalties
MSI/SIAM provider Management protocols

Source: Gartner: Use Eective Multisourcing OLAs to Deliver Integrated Services and Business
Outcomes
Published: 28 May 2014, Analyst(s): Jim Longwood, Gilbert van der Heiden, William Maurer

Governance

By its very nature, SIAM is a very dynamic function with many players with multiple
inter-dependencies and lines of control. To ensure smooth operations and guaranteed business
performance, well-planned governance structures need to be put in place to manage and obliterate
potential loopholes. This can be done through forums such as :

Proactive issue resolution and operational reviews

End-to-end performance and compliance review of the suppliers
Steering committees which drive continuous innovation and improvement in the SIAM function

SIAM MSI Suppliers

Service Delivery Supplier Service

Reviews Managers

up
Suppliers
Operational Reviews Process
Managers
A Glimpse into the
"Gold Standard"
SIAM Function
Best Practices from a SIAM Supplier s perspective, gleaned
from more than 100 successful implementations
Design an eective operating model to foster a culture of collaboration,
innovation and success.
The industry now believes that creating a multi-source ecosystem with the
right mix of collaboration and competitive tension could help organizations
that they need, while eectively integrating and evolving those services in
lock-step with rapid business growth.
The simplied goal is to coordinate internal and external suppliers and the
services they deliver in an ecient, but cost-eective way. To achieve this,
however, the design of the overall SIAM function should drive a culture of
customer and the ecosystem rst and supplier needs second. Does this
mean that if you are putting an agile, responsible and responsive service
ecosystem in place that you need to go back to the drawing board? With the
right framework and operating model you don t have to.
An operating model helps decipher and simplify the scope of the SIAM oce
into components, towers and organizations, and depicts how the whole
eco-system works. It can help suppliers and the business stakeholders
understand the whole picture. Thus the operating model provides a blueprint
for multiple domains including processes, people and technology used for
service management. The world's leading SIAM suppliers have established
operating models by combining ITIL with other prevalent service
management and compliance guidelines. One such example is the Gold
Standard SIAM Process Framework from HCL.
What to look for when evaluating a SIAM supplier?
There are several views in the industry as to what should form part of the SIAM supplier s scope. The SIAM
function should be designed not only as an enabler to functionally aggregate and coordinate component
services from discrete service providers to deliver a seamless end to end service, but also to foster a
culture of cooperation and collaboration within the ecosystem.

One of the key success factors for the model to succeed is neutrality. The SIAM supplier cannot be seen as
being partial or biased towards the resources/teams (if any) from their own organization providing
services in one of the towers. Another important aspect to consider is that the suppliers in the ecosystem,
may also be competing in the marketplace.

Track Record in Multisourced Ability to Integrate Operations Ability to Deliver and Manage Ability to integrate cloud
Environment at First level Help Desk an End-to-End Service Service Brokerage Functions

Experienced in managing multiple Industrial-strength help desk End-to-end service delivery Automated service brokerage and
traditional and cloud Service capable of supporting of quality including related end-to- orchestration functions.
providers supporting an ecosystem of end performance reporting
providers

Service management framework Supports multivendor service Collaborative service Toolsets for integration between
portfolio/catalog. management of multiple cloud management platforms and
providers. CSB aggregation tools.

Quality management framework Ability to establish, measure and Understanding of business Cross-platform integration toolkits
enforce OLA objectives. for laaS to aPaaS to SaaS layers,
for example.

Value-added governance NA Workable governance Ability to Establish, measure and

frameworks and OLA templates frameworks. enforce extended OLA across IT
and Cloud Service.

OLA= Operational Level Agreement: MSI = Multisourcing Services Integrator: CSB = Cloud Services Brokerage. laaS= Integration as a Service;
aPaaS = Application Platform as a Service: N/A = Not Applicable
For further information on CSB integration see Manage Your cloud services With the right Roles and Technologies (G00238933) and What IT
leaders Need to Know About Cloud Services Integration: Proactively Address the Challenge (G00247426).

Source: Gartner (August 2013)

The processes and activities to be performed by the SIAM supplier can be t into two broad stacks`

Service design, transition and operation processes (e.g. incident, change, release, etc.)
Contract and commercial management processes

There are varying views in the industry, and several organizations include the contract and commercial
management processes within the external suppliers scope as well. This is not unusual as invoice
management has traditionally been outsourced to BPOs.

However, depending on the operating model, it may be advisable for the contract and commercial
management processes to be retained by the customer or separated from the service operations part of
the SIAM organization, to ensure that:

If the SI supplier is also an organization providing one or more technology services, then they are not
managing their own invoices, service credits, penalties, etc. (akin to the fox guarding the hen house )
Since the SI partner may be competing with the other suppliers in the marketplace, if they are not
directly involved in the commercial management of the contract of the suppliers, this will help avoid
issues within the ecosystem and help support the culture of collaboration
 Depicted below is a sample SIAM operating model (process and tower view)

Customer Business Divisions

Business Unit 1 Business Unit 1 Business Unit 1

Commercial/ Contract
Service Integration & Management
Mgmt.
Service Strategy & Design Service Transition Service Operation
Demand Management Transition planning and Support Event Management
Service portfolio management Change Management Incident Management including Major
Service Catalogue Management Asset Management Incident Management
Service Level Management Configuration Management Request Fulfillment
Availability Management Release & Deployment Management Problem Management
Capacity Management Service Validation and Testing Access Management
Financial Management
IT Service Continuity Management

Knowledge Management

Contract Management Information Security Management

Demand

Supply
Commercial Issue Service Measurement and Reporting
Management
Continual Service Improvement & Innovation
Supplier Risk and
Contractual Service Desk
Compliance
Enterprise Operations Center (Monitoring)
Invoice Management SIAM interface SIAM interface SIAM interface
Partner Eco-System

End User Services Managed Network Hosting Service

Performance penalties

Maintenance suppliers
Supplier Services Supplier Supplier

Apps Development&
and earn backs
EUS Device Mgmt
Commercial VDI and Citrix WAW Services Data Center Hosting

Other Supplier
adjustments S/W Configuration and LAN services Physical Platform
Distribution Commo Network Virtual Platforms
Mobile Device Mgmt Services Mainframe
Field Services etc etc
etc

Below is a depiction of an Enterprise Service Integration Platform

Ask
Ask
Demand Supply

Role-based access
Enterprise self service
Billing & Metering Payment Dynamic Service Store Reporting Service/ Asset View Appstore/ Marketplace
Listen &Create

ESM Aggregation Asset & CI Aggregation Cloud Aggregation

ITSM Aggregation (HCL GBP)
Repeat

Service Creation & Publishing

(HCL Event Mgmt GBP) (HCL GBP) (HCL My Cloud & My Workplace)

Unified
Service Interface with
IT Business Service Mgmt Operational Service Desk
Lifecycle PMO, VMO,
Mgmt Office Integration & Command
Mgmt EA
Center

Service Resell Service Intermediation Service Arbitrage Service Aggregation

Service Provider Ecosystem

IaaS Offerings PaaS Services SaaS Services Virtualization Physical
Supplier A Supplier B Supplier C Supplier D

Adjust ITSM ESM ITSM ESM ESM ITSM ESM

Partner On Premise/ External On Premise/ Internal On Premise/
Cloud Services Cloud Services Cloud Services
CMDB CMDB CMDB

Implied OLA matrix

A tried and tested operating model can expedite the establishment of an eective SIAM function, but not
until it is actually implemented through an IT Service Management Technology platform, such as
ServiceNow or BMC Remedy. On their own, these platforms do not bring any of the common ITSM
processes to life, and conguring and programming them to accept dierent inputs and connect with a
variety of systems, building complex workows and rule engines etc, can be time-consuming to the point
of being harmful to the overall SIAM establishment exercise. One solution could be to leverage
prepackaged distributables which can signicantly expedite SIAM go-live . One such example of a
prepackaged SIAM solution is HCL s Gold Blueprint, which, as a ServiceNow image, can help organizations
launch the SIAM function in a short timeframe.
In summary, eective SIAM is not a task. It requires diligence, planning and focused execution across
three towers: people (culture), process and technology. And sometimes, choosing the right SIAM partner
with experience across all three can mean the dierence between eective SIAM and a long hard road
that leads to eventual business dissatisfaction.
ArcelorMittal Europe , the world s largest steel producer, with an IT portfolio
which comprises of Dozens of shared IT services and Hundreds of IT service
providers spread all over the globe lists Service Integration & Management
as a vital need for business.

Christophe Bauret, Head of Service Management, ArcelorMittal Europe - "In

the current IT landscape, business functions do not necessarily rely on their IT
organization to provide computerized services and apps. Cloud and
web-based solutions and managed services are addressed by the business
functions as extensions of their IT organization. The advent of new services
appearing and sold as "ready to use," or "plug and play" have added to the
confusion. Thus the need for complex service integration has brought on a
shift in everyone's mindset, and is one of the key focus areas of the Arcleor
Mittal IT organization. HCL is helping ArcelorMittal in this journey by providing
a common Europe Service Desk and a common set up ITIL process and tools
based on their Gold Blueprint and ServiceNow propositions."
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For more information please write to contact.infra@hcl.com

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