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