Evolution of Multi-Vendor Management Approaches - SIAM, SMI and MSI

For a significant time now we are seeing that businesses no longer depend on one IT service provider. There has been a shift whereby business relied on multiple service providers and in many cases there has been more than five IT service providers catering to a single business. Businesses reaped the benefits in terms of cost but what was overlooked was the complexity that would arise in managing multiple suppliers. The benefits were eventually offset by the complexity. This was a time when service integration as a concept evolved. Service providers started pitching themselves as service integrators.

As a result of the complexity in managing multiple suppliers, last couple of years has seen another shift whereby the businesses have started focusing on vendor consolidation and restricting the number of suppliers they engage with.  Gradually businesses have put forth a strategy whereby one of the suppliers is selected as lead supplier and are given an additional responsibility to manage other suppliers which is predominantly from operational perspective.

During this time concepts called Service Management Integration (SMI) and Multi-supplier Integration (MSI) evolved. Majority of leading service providers or service integrators have created their own approach or model around SMI.

Also, during 2012 OGC felt the need to have a framework or approach around service integration and management of service providers. They named this approach as Service Integration and Management (SIAM). Also, a work group was constituted to create and detail SIAM. This working group had come out with their initial work but before the concept could have seen the light-of-the-day Axelos was created (decision on formation of Axelos was taken in mid-2013). I do not have any information regarding what happened to the investments and work of the working group.

This also resulted in number of SIAM models or approaches coming to the market led by Accenture, IBM, TCS, Capgemini and Atos. Off-late other service providers like HP, Wipro, etc. have also been pitching-in.

Since the conception of the SIAM working group by OGC, I had been following the developments and doing my own research towards what business challenges are and what should be covered as part of SIAM. I have been working along with one of friends, another ITSM expert, Rakesh to create our own SIAM model. This model is based on our extensive research in this area. We are calling this model as SIAM Fluid-Pump model inspired by the mechanical concepts (Though we are not mechanical engineers J) we learnt during our engineering days.

Market already had SMI (MSI as an approach did not really convert into a model or approach adopted or named by IT service providers) and various service providers including Capgemini has their models named after SMI. Then, why do we need SIAM and SMI.  Are these two approaches same? Additionally number of organizations and service providers has Service Management Office (SMO) responsible for managing service management processes with some of the activities spanning across all the IT service providers for a customer. This threw up another question for us - How is SMO different?

These questions had troubled us a lot. We got our answers as our research progressed. I will describe these concepts in my next blog providing a clear demarcation between these approaches.

Please note that my descriptions are more from the way these approaches should be and may not fit into the way things currently are. In most of the models that I have seen, I do not see any difference between SMI and SIAM. At times SMO also looks too similar.