In June, the SIAM Foundation Body-of-Knowledge and accompanying certification got formally endorsed by the itSMF UK, and simultaneously the SIAM Foundation Architect Group won the Professional Service Management‘ Thought Leadership’ award. Enough reason to have a closer look at this publication and certification.
The term‘ service integration and management’( SIAM) originated around 2005 from within the UK public sector. In 2010, the UK Government launched their ICT strategy which included moving away from large prime supplier contracts to a more flexible approach using multiple providers and cloud based solutions. The term SIAM is a reference to an approach to help bring some control to the management of those multiple service providers. Other acronyms that are in use are:
• MSI( Multi Sourcing Integration)
• SMI( Service Management Integration)
• SI( Service Integration)
• SMAI( Service Management and Integration)
• SI & M( Service Integration & Management).
Despite the publication of white papers, blogs and twitter hashtag feeds, providing various flavours of commentary and opinion, until recently there has been no formalisation of the term SIAM, nor a standardised methodology. As such, practitioners were left lacking when looking for answers to the questions of‘ what is
SIAM?’ and‘ can it help manage complex IT
environments?’.
To try to bring commonality of purpose, Michelle Major-Goldsmith and Simon Dorst started conversations with Claire Agutter from Scopism, to initiate a project
that aimed to clarify SIAM practices and create content that could be offered to the community, free of charge. A plan was forged, and in 2016 a collective of IT consultants, trainers and practitioners( now known as the‘ the SIAM Foundation Architect Group’) embarked upon creating a foundational Body of Knowledge( BoK) and accompanying certification for SIAM.
Claire Agutter, Director of Scopism said:‘….”
The objective was to bring the giants of the SIAM world together and create a consolidated view of their knowledge and experience.
4 itSMF Bulletin— July 2017