SIAM Survey & Investigation in Finland
itSMF Finland Chapter’ s SIAM Special Interest Group( SIG) has been busy last couple of months finalizing two major studies together with Metropolia University of Applied Sciences concerning Service Integration and Management( SIAM).
SIAM SIG wanted to know which are the real-world best practices around SIAM that are found to be useful in companies in Finland and how companies are measuring and monitoring SIAM in action.
In this article results of the studies are shared with the ITSM community.
SIAM SIG was born in Early 2016 itSMF Finland SIAM SIG was founded in the Spring of 2016. The group consisted – and still consists – of a number of professionals representing different aspects of the Finnish ITindustry; members from the customer, consultancy andservice provider sides.
The reason for the group founding was pure interest to investigate and understand SIAM maturity, expectations, fears, hopes and wishes in Finland, around the companies that would either utilize SIAM themselves or provide SIAM related services to other companies.
The Area of Investigation
As SIAM has been a hot topic for a while in Finland but very little material was available of actual use cases, implementations and best practices, SIAM SIG decided to start their own research and work around the topics.
The initial SIAM survey was conducted in the summer of 2016 among member companies of itSMF Finland. The survey results and conclusions were presented in the Finnish itSMF conference in the end of 2016. The results showed a big variety of understanding and expectations around SIAM; as was mostly guessed beforehand, SIAM in Finland had more talk than concrete actions around it.
One of the aims of itSMF Finland & SIG groups are also to co-operate with universities in Finland, to support either students with diplomas or to give, for example, thesis topics around IT for the students to work on.
SIAM SIG group co-operated with Metropolia University of Applied Sciences by giving a thesis & investigations opportunity around the area of SIAM; Giving the students a great opportunity to widen own knowledge and to create a thesis of actual and important topics.
Co-operation with Metropolia University of Applied Sciences
The co-operation with Metropolia was divided into 2 different streams.
The first study was conducted by Metropolia student Otso Virri, who started to work with SIAM SIG in H2 / 2016.
Otso started to assist SIAM SIG with the investigation and his thesis started around the area of SIAM practices in Finland. Otso also joined the itSMF conference together with SIAM SIG to present the results.
In the end of 2016, Otso also traveled to the itSMF UK conference, sponsored by itSMF Finland, to support even more his thesis work and understanding of SIAM.
Otso also conducted a lot of interviews with several different companies in Finland, both customers and service providers, to gain a wide knowledge and understanding of SIAM in Finland.
Otso’ s thesis was completed in Q2 of 2017.
The second collaboration was done with Metropolia students Harri Palomäki, Markus Heinonen and Myunghuyn Youm. They started to investigate SIAM dashboards that companies could & should utilize in their daily IT operations.
The students conducted a lot of research around the concepts and fundamentals around IT & SIAM to understand where the value in dashboards comes from.
The students were active interviewing customers & service providers around the area of SIAM dashboards to be able to create and propose dashboards with real value.
The SIAM dashboards project was completed in Q2 of 2017.
Co-operation in streams was very successful for both parties- students themselves, gaining IT & SIAM understanding and a lot of concrete and valuable experience, and of course giving them a solid, good thesis work. This work gave a lot of valuable information for SIAM SIG and all the members of itSMF Finland, as was the original goal of the thesis.
Thesis Conclusions Otso Virri. Thesis conclusions, Service Integration and Management( SIAM) practices and four Case Studies of Finnish companies:
Service Integration and Management( SIAM) is a developing concept for managing and governing multiple services and service providers. Although it is a relevantly new concept in terms of literature, it has been discussed and applied in many industries for years. SIAM can provide a business with improved transparency and control over service landscape, and create a single business-facing ITorganization for the end users and mask the complexity of service networks.
Implementing a SIAM model has proven to be beneficial for a lot of organizations, but it is not a concept for everyone, as it demands strong operational and commercial governance.
20 itSMFI Forum Focus— June 2017