SIAM Whitepaper

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The Future ICT Organisation: The Service Integration & Management Model (SIAM)


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1. About INPROC

INPROC are thought leaders in change and management. Built around senior leaders in UK public and private sectors, particularly Performance, ICT, Knowledge Management and Commercial domains, INPROC brings significant experience and expertise to resolving the challenges of policy change and the delivery of operational solutions for Government and commercial organisations. Having been responsible for the delivery of major public change programmes in the NHS and Central & Local Government the authors are experts in Government sourcing and how the impact of policy change can influence the management structures and relationships required for successful outcomes on both the supply and client side.

For a list of contributors & contributing editors please visit the INPROC website: http://www.inproc.co.uk/about-us/meet-the-team/

2. Background

The UK is reputed to have the most mature public sector outsourcing market in Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA). According to the Information Services Group (ISG, March 2013) the UK accounts for 84% of total public sector outsourcing. Benefits and perceptions of ICT outsourcing has been varied over the years, this has led to a shift in emphasis and approach being promoted by the Cabinet Office.

There is now a shift to shorter contracts and an increased push towards the use of Cloud forcing its maturity, drives to increase Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) share of the outsourcing market and the move to the Service Integration and Management (SIAM) Model.

Along with related trends in the ICT market, this is creating new challenges to be resolved in the approach and governance of ICT. Common to all outsourcing models is the ultimate retention of business processes by the client, indeed at some stage all ‘Tower’ processes ultimately interact with the business customer and the business processes.

However across Government different interpretations and requirements for the SIAM role have led to a variety of contracting models and scope of service. Examples have been seen whereby the SIAM’s contractual obligations are directly linked to the other “Tower” service providers so if one fails, they all share the pain. That implies the need of a coherent business management framework by which a SIAM is able to manage the end to end service.

Using its expertise in public sector these changes have led INPROC to examine the challenges and suggest the key priorities for consideration when moving to the SIAM model.

3. The SIAM role

The SIAM model enables organisations to move from a position where they buy a full range of services by line of business silos from the large System Integrators to one where functional services, such as desktop, are bought for the whole organization from a series of Tower suppliers. The SIAM provider role is to provide the overall direction, management and coordination for the delivery of the end-to-end ICT services for the organisation by exploiting and managing the Tower suppliers. This should be based on the development of clear principles, policies and processes that should be applied in a standard way across all of the Towers in order to achieve a coherent approach to ICT, which will enable easy interoperability of both management approach and technology between the Towers.


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The purpose of SIAM is to provide cost effective and agile ICT to meet the customer’s needs by bringing together the various elements provided by each Tower. This should result in

• Lower costs by exploiting economies of scale within the Towers with services paid for on a usage basis driven by strong competition on price and quality.

• A single coherent strategic approach to supply chain management and control, ensuring structured common performance management which leads to effective market exploitation and further cost reductions.

• Better services through the ability to buy from the best vendor for each service tower and to develop integrated solutions that meet the Business needs.

• Increased agility by enabling services to be scaled up quickly when demand grows and scaled down when capacity is not required, rather than having a year round capacity based on the maximum need which is only required to meet temporary peaks. This requires a shift to a position where ICT is provided as a service (‘ICTaaS’) where the Client is focused on the outcomes required without the need to own the assets needed to provide the service.

• A clear roadmap enabling the development and implementation of an architectural strategy that is aligned with the business needs of the organization.

• The development of a commodity based approach using COTS products wherever possible which adhere to open standards.

• More flexibility to change suppliers if necessary, whether to remove poor performing suppliers or to bring in new more innovative suppliers without the need for long procurement cycles and complicated organisational & technology on-boarding.

o Note: Whilst more flexibility drives innovation and competition, it is critical that the cost and risk of change is factored into this calculation

The SIAM supplier has a pivotal role in ensuring the provision of successful ICT to an organization since it needs to act as a critical friend to the Client organization, with a good understanding of their business needs, and to manage the Towers in such a way that they are able to deliver coherent and cost effective solutions for the Business. It provides the single point of focus for users and suppliers to ensure that solutions are based on standard process and fit within the overall architectural design. It therefore needs to earn the trust of all parties since it has the ultimate responsibility for making and explaining decisions, which will sometimes not be in the best interests of an individual Tower supplier.

Based on this model, the UK Government expects to move away from the stranglehold which it feels the big SI companies have had over government to a more flexible and agile model which will enable them to take early advantage of changes in technology and to implement policy changes more quickly and cost effectively.

SIAM is not a panacea – it changes the nature of the problem and risks just moving them elsewhere. The challenge is in the transition and in the governance of a performance based relationship where suppliers can move in and out of the delivery structure and User/Business engagement and buy-in is continually improved.

4. The transition challenge

Whilst the SIAM vision is clear, moving from where organisations are today to the new model is a major challenge. In an ideal world most organisations would choose to start with a clean sheet rather than having to transition from the 20+ years of legacy IT which they are currently running. This makes


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the transition from the existing model to the SIAM model a critical success factor since organisations will expect this to be done without any adverse impact on service during the transition.

To be successful with transition the SIAM ‘supplier’ needs to

• have a clear view of

o business management framework coherently bringing together

§ the organisations strategic goals and their alignment to the Target Operating Model, key performance measures and associated responsible owners

§ the Target Operating Model (TOM) which will support the organization

§ the Enterprise architecture underpinning the TOM

§ the business case for change

§ risks and controls

• understand the existing operating model and its supporting architecture

• develop a clear view of how to move to the new TOM, which will enable the SIAM to provide a coherent IT service across the Towers

• Implement a continuous monitoring and reporting capability

However the transition will inevitably not be easy since in most cases the procurement of the SIAM supplier and the various Tower suppliers will not be done at the same time. As a result during the transition organisations will be operating a mixed model e.g. when a Tower is created, such as Hosting, that part of the existing supplier’s total IT provision for a business silo will be provided by the new Tower supplier, but the existing supplier will still be responsible for providing the remaining IT, which will eventually be moved to subsequent Towers as they are let, which may well not be operated by the existing supplier. The challenge for the SIAM is to reduce risks and work with the Client to find ways in which the exiting suppliers can be motivated to continue delivering a high quality service (both running existing services and continuing to develop on-going projects), whilst bedding down the new Tower suppliers as they come on stream. The complexity of this transition is often underplayed by Client organisations.

To make transition successful the SIAM supplier also needs

o an in depth understanding of the Client, including its organizational structures and the internal politics and other drivers within those structures

o to work with the various parts of the organization in ways which make the various user communities feel that the new arrangements are being done “with” them and not “to” them

o to recognize some of the business units in the Client organization may well resent a centralized approach to the provision of IT if they feel their existing provision from a single supplier has met their needs

o to establish credibility by demonstrating they understand how the totality of the transition fits together by developing a clear overarching plan with a proper understanding of the dependencies supported by a transition plan for each Tower. These plans will need to be actively managed with the SIAM supplier demonstrating that they can spot problems early and find solutions which are acceptable to all parties


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o to be trusted by the Client, the Tower suppliers and the exiting suppliers by developing collaborative behaviours, which encourage partnership working. This is easy when things are going well but much more difficult when problems arise (which is bound to happen given the complexity of the transition) and will require the SIAM to:

o avoid developing a blame culture

o identify the root cause of service failure and be able to identify the owning supplier, providing evidence of the diagnosis, to ensure the continued and developing trust in the process

o be seen to listen to each Stakeholder and ensure each stakeholder knows that their views are properly understood

o be able to explain the various options for resolution, together with the pros and cons of those options, including the consequences for individual stakeholders

o strong Programme Management capabilities, including a rigorous Change management process to ensure the full impact of changes to the Transition plan on all stakeholders are properly thought through

o recognise that new business changes will also be required throughout the transition period and will need to be implemented without any adverse effect on the transition

The client needs a clear understanding of the business, and the processes that the suppliers are supporting – along with a view of how those processes are performing. With changing providers and flexible application of the model, a common suite of tools will vastly improve the performance and on-going transitional activities

5. Key features of the SIAM role

The key role of the SIAM is to deliver a single and clear interface to support the ICT needs of all users in the Client community, irrespective of which Tower supplier is providing specific aspects of the service, which is clearly aligned to the Client’s business goals. This requires the SIAM to integrate, manage, monitor and improve the ICT services from each of the Tower suppliers into end to end business services, which are delivered based on agreed standards and processes.

The SIAM role will include a number of standard ICT roles such as

o the provision of an integrated service desk for a multi supplier environment, which supports all stakeholders, including end users and Tower suppliers. This will include responsibility for first and second line support, service monitoring and alerting, event management, access management etc. This should be based on the use of standardised products in order to maximise the benefits that can be achieved from the SIAM model

o multi supplier management, including management of changes that cross supplier boundaries, release management, capacity management etc. where there will often be the potential for conflicts of interests which will need to be quickly identified and resolved

o service validation and testing including test planning and design and the management of test environments

o service provider assurance including process, requirements and standards compliance audits


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o service knowledge management based on clear processes for creating, storing and accessing service data, as well as the publication and analysis of service performance as the basis for identifying areas where the service can be improved

o service management tool integration; to select, implement and configure tools to provide standard approaches across multiple suppliers

o management of service catalogues

o provision of business continuity processes and plans

o Responsibility for all aspects of IT security

o effective governance to ensure that the client side stakeholder views are understood and swiftly acted upon

6. Effective Tools

To deliver through transition and with a changing suite of suppliers, certain requirements for governance, policies and processes need to be established – with common tooling able to link together the various suppliers, processes, people, organisation, risks, controls and information into the business.

A successful SIAM implementation will ensure that these are delivered such that new supplier services and tools can be rapidly integrated (and removed) whilst maintaining overall control and performance view.

The technical challenges of continuing existing operational processes and systems during the roll on and off of new tower suppliers will require a specific focus on integration and management. The SIAM role will require the use of common tooling to deliver effective integrated service and event management. Its use will ensure performance is monitored and maintained during the transition to new service suppliers. With the added probability of a mixed estate of cloud and also on site based services, the ability of management and performance monitoring tools to provide a holistic view of services in this complex environment is even more critical to the success of the SIAM model.

7. Conclusion

The real value of the SIAM model depends on the ability of the SIAM to move to a more coherent architecture that provides the flexibility to deliver both the cost benefits of the SIAM model as well as the ability to make changes quickly. Ideally this should be based on the use of products which

o allow easy access to other suppliers products in order to avoid lock in to a particular suppliers product sets and allow easy interoperability

o allow easy access to other media used by external organisations. This is becoming more important as the end user for government services is increasingly becoming the individual citizen as services are moved on line, rather than a Civil Servant sitting in a government office

o enable reusability based on the use of standardised products and open standards based solutions e.g. operating models based on COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Management), TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework), ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)

This needs to be underpinned by


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o strong and effective governance that ensures decisions can be made quickly. This needs to be developed in conjunction with the Client to ensure decisions are aligned to business needs

o a cost model which is firmly based on the pay for what you use principle

o a clear understanding of the role of the retained Client function and the way it interacts with the SIAM

The ability to quickly identify a clear Target Operating Model and the path for achieving that, together with the ability to create an environment which encourages genuine collaborative behaviour across the Supplier and Client community including the governance and the enabling tools will indeed be the distinguishing features that mark out the most successful SIAM providers.

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