Welcome back, we are continuing our series on SIAM challenges – this week we’re focusing on Strategy or the lack of it. This mini blog is published in 2 sections; this is 2 of 2 on Strategic challenges.

Continuing on from part 1, there are significantly more Strategic and Tactical challenges, as we are only scratching the surface. When you start to think about things such as Tool Strategy, Platforms to share, we continue the list of things you need to have answers.

Your platform Who’s tool will be king?! what tools will be used such as;

• Technology you have to think about licensing, data ownership, security, Enterprise Architecture standards, Federated CMDB, Data modelling, reporting and more
• ITIL toolsets, PMO toolsets, monitoring, reporting, data warehousing how will this all work together? How will you achieve end to end governing approach to reporting everything that is going on in your ecosystem?
• What about your business processes and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) Capability?
• Your portal for customers and end users?
• Is your current tool also able to handle multi-tenancy, multi-vendor approach? A lot of the tools today are so heavily customised, difficult to navigate and are not easy to use; it might be a good time to look at a refresh and leaner approach to how you work today, your processes and how the tool supports and manages workload.

Your data is gold, data that is appropriately harvested, analysed and provided in digestible formats provides much insight to what is going on your environment, to your services, and how they are affecting your customers, their reliability, availability and how they are performing. More importantly, if you are able to host the SM solution yourselves this is the ideal position to be in as;

• The data will always be yours
• You can plug and play with your SPs
• Working towards a single source of truth
• Remember to think about licensing, security
• What about service mapping, SLAs, service monitoring, Customer experience levels (XLA’s) and your service architecture blueprint needs to be solid.

Most organisations that outsource either come with their tool and processes and “use the customer” processes and integrate their tool into yours. I have seen this work 50% of the time if that. At the end of the day, you’re the customer; you’re paying, you should have the clout to say my tool, my processes. The data is what you want to own and ensure you have all of it 100%. What I have seen in SI, SIAM environments where not all tickets –> data –> information is logged and then pushed to the customer. You are missing out. Data is a valuable commodity it should be treated as currency. If you do not have a choice and have to accept data feeds, there is much to design and consider to ensure that is works but also what and when data is pushed/pulled.

• Governance vs Management At the end of the day you are the client/customer your role is to Govern, Your SI manages services for you, with you. Which leads to Governance and Management activities, tasks, processes, roles, metrics and more. COBIT 5 can be used beautifully with your processes, Business and IT, as its Enterprise Governance model. It’s pretty simple and should be kept that way, don’t over complicate things, remember the KISS principle. More on this in SIAM challenge no 3; Governance vs Management coming up soon. Even with the COBIT 2019 update, these activities are separate.
• The Organisational Change Management (OCM) Strategy The Organisational Change Management (OCM) Strategy describes the high-level approach, activities and deliverables to enable a successful business change.  OCM is vitally important to ensure you consider how the change will be addressed, communicated and expectations managed and more. There will be a lot more in SIAM Challenges 2; People! This is by far the biggest challenge.  The considerations are huge and across the board both with the customer due to changes and new roles that are needed but also with the service providers, stakeholders and more.
• Performance How will you measure SIAM? When the spirit of SIAM is about collaboration, cooperation and of course coordination. Service Level Management is simply not enough. The metrics captured and reported on are stale and probably developed a long time ago a focused singularly on an individual vendors performance. Why not refresh your Service Measurement and reporting, take your reports and metrics through CSI. More importantly, talk to the business about what they want to see reported on. Remember ITIL is inwardly focused on IT, so all our reports are focused on what we want to understand and measure. More importantly what do you with your reports besides filing them on your portal? This is a massive consideration, so keep an eye out on Challenge No 4, its all about Performance.

• Commercials Another difficult challenge and mainly due to the legal, commercial and contractual aspect of outsourcing services. Unfortunately, commercial agreements are necessary evils and provide a safeguard for all parties involved. However, they are also the cause of many business and customer relationship issues when one party is not flexible or over demanding. More on this topic Challenge 5: Commercials.

And there is more

So many more topics and considerations to make;

1. Common Data Dictionary
2. Service Provider/Partnership ecosystem
3. Security and IDM
4. Risk and Issue planning
5. Benefits realisation, value mapping and how you will monitor value delivered?
6. SWOT – focus on the opportunities, strengths, the weakness and threats these are opportunities to understand and address. Remembering your SP can help in this area.
7. Your processes needed not just ITSM but business as well
8. SoaP – how you will move from and to your new operating model, time scaled, your approach to achieve the end goal

And finally the Business case, articulating the strategic intent of SIAM

1. Tangibles benefits, ROI
2. Intangible benefits, VOI
3. Business and IT benefits, ie ESM Benefits

“Talk to others that are doing this, have done or are trying to do this”

Marketing testing It’s is also a good time to potentially test the marketing, go out to tender, there are many providers doing good things, some bad, within the SIAM space. You need to do your homework. Ask your vendors for evidence, innovative things that they can bring to the table. You want your SI to be a strategic partner, to help with planning, but also innovate. But to do this you the customer must have the maturity to do this, as well as capability to build trusting business relationships. Act to your SIAM behavioural codes, more on that in part 2 and 4.

Key takeaway messages:

• There is so much strategic planning, thinking and collaborating to do before embarking on this. If you think of the end game, and what your outcome needs to look like, work backwards towards achieving those goals.
• Use this strategic plan to develop tactical and operational capabilities needed. Lots of workshops that can help articulate and get those creative juices flowing to start your strategic planning.
• Involve the right stakeholders, talk to others, craft you plan and seek feedback, input and ideas from within your organisation and outside.
• Ensure all your tactical plans underpin the overall strategy. I have seen many examples where they have been disjointed as a lack of collaboration across the organisational silos.

Remember, if you don’t plan, …

Please check back later and we will continue with the next theme: The SIAM People Challenge. Feel free to leave any comments and or notes you’d like to highlight or discuss.

Thank you for reading our little blog!

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