Service Integration and Management or SIAM is a functional framework. Stereotypically, if you dig deep, you put your wing on the framework laid out by ITIL. It starts in the ITIL lifecycle model and is therefore both a framework and a feature. Unlike ITIL, SIAM has an additional focus on service delivery and holistic governance with governance across all partners. It is holistically responsible for ensuring that the service management reference point is enabled with governance and security controls.
Unlike its predecessors, SIAM supports a strong and robust relationship between business and IT. It all explains the importance placed on planning for alignment between service consumers, applications, cloud services, and infrastructure partners.
SIAM plans towards CSI and service management and focuses on providing a hierarchical and functional vision of the organization. In short, as Wiki suggests: “Service Integration and Management (SIAM) is a framework for managing multiple information technology service providers and integrating them to provide a single business-oriented IT organization.”
Highlights of SIAM
- Fundamentally, SIAM is a progression of the ITSM concept of ITIL.
- It is more of a service integration and not a systems integration like its predecessors.
- SIAM is about end-to-end governance and accountability of service delivery.
- It is an orientation of end-to-end authority, responsibility, and ownership and is based on empowerment, coordination, and collaboration among service providers. It is never about officialism, however, SIAM always advocates and maps the inputs of the process with the products among the partners.
Therefore, the perspective with which SIAM works is more oriented towards the performance and availability of the service for its end user and is never directed solely based on the profit-making point of view of the provider.
Functions and responsibilities of a SIAM consultant
The primary functional role of a SIAM consultant is to design and implement key processes. The main focus is on incorporating and functionally using the eTOM framework with a strategic and tactical point of view and ensuring seamless end-to-end service delivery globally across all providers and maintaining consistency.
A SIAM consultant leads and identifies areas of system and service integration to improve collaboration between partners and their functional heads. From commissioning of all services to functional operation, she oversees and ensures that processes run smoothly. Once the process begins to walk on its legacies, further analysis of reporting KPIs and identification of factors to drive continuous service improvement (CSI) will take place.
Being an SIAM process manager, I feel that the role of a SIAM consultant has colossal responsibilities aligned to their profile and only a person with a holistic view of the environment can do the role justice. Lastly, the IT industry is a constantly evolving process and with SIAM as another feather in its crown, it will achieve further development and achievement in the future.