Member meet-ups return with all things SIAM

For many years, regional meet-ups were the lifeblood of itSMF UK. During the Pandemic, we turned to Zoom and Teams to share the collective expertise of our members; but there’s nothing like an in-person event to provide the networking opportunity that the service management community really appreciates.

On Tuesday 13^th September Leeds Building Society (LBS) hosted a return to the in-person format with a well-attended discussion of all things SIAM – Service Integration and Management.

This event was originally schedule for March 2020, and subsequently postponed again in July of this year because of the extreme heatwave. But all 36 attendees agreed it was worth the wait, with representatives from BT Enterprise, BT Openreach, Fujitsu, NHS, CGI, Tata, Arcadis, Atkins SNC Lavlin, University of Leeds and of course LBS itself.

The presenters were Tony Williams, ICT Programme Director at Sellafield, Al Philpott, Head of the Service Advisory Practice at CGI, and Alex Harris, Platform Run Lead – Mortgage Originations at LBS.

All speakers emphasised the importance of focusing of people, managing change, and communicating a clear, shared vision of any new SIAM initiative, according to LBS’s Lee Young:

“I liked Tony’s suggestion of bringing together suppliers in a monthly collaboration forum to ensure suppliers play nicely. Otherwise the only time they meet is when something goes wrong which is perhaps not the most conducive environment to learn to collaborate with each other!

Al’s presentation made the very strong point that SIAM has been heavily focused on ‘run’ elements of the business (i.e. keeping the lights on). Maturing SIAM needs to focus on Service Transition and the concept of a Transition Squad to bring together non-functional and non-IT elements such as commercial, finance, people and business process change. Any of them are just as likely to derail your initiative as an IT issue.

From Alex’s presentation, I took away the importance of building supplier relationships – when you call them at 5pm on a Friday it’s Alex calling, not LBS.  Engendering TRUST through a good relationship is a huge element of that.

“From the discussion I gathered that the audience favoured an internal service integrator (“they bleed the same colour as the customer”) but accepted that hybrid was often a necessary starting point due to a lack of capability and experience of working a multi-supplier environment.”

Another attendee, Richard Horton (itSMF UK board member and Service Delivery Manager at NIHR CRNCC at the University of Leeds), brought a number of colleagues to the event as their organisation has been discussing how to embrace SIAM:

“It’s always interesting to hear how other organisations have been dealing with our common challenges. Sellafield has particular constraints that don’t apply to us but the principles that were described and the potential pitfalls that they had to navigate can still be applied in different contexts. We may not have the same safety critical infrastructure to protect but the principle of only using your most extreme governance protocols where you need to is relevant elsewhere. 

I was also interested to hear how approaches to SIAM are evolving. We are not a large-scale organisation, so it was good to hear about smaller scale uses of SIAM principles within the Leeds Building Society and how they are delivering value. This show-cased the idea that a more incremental CSI type approach can work as an alternative to a big ‘doing SIAM’ project. There were some healthy reminders about how challenging it is to employ effective end-to-end SLAs and the importance of only putting into contracts what you intend to measure.”

Richard gave the final word to his colleagues from inside and outside ITSM:

From outside service management…

• “It made clear how early involvement of Service Management in business change can make a real difference”
• “The talk of T-shaped individuals rang true – it’s part of what we were trying to achieve in attending this event (see Barry Corless’s blog on the subject for more information)”

From inside service management…

• “The event emphasised how much difference it makes when service management is involved in designing services that use multiple suppliers. Based on this session, we’ve identified some immediate opportunities for improving how to do things.”
• “Doing this properly involves thinking differently about what we do and what our suppliers do.” 
• “This highlights the need to be more focused on contracts.”
• There’s a lot to get to grips with. However process-focused we are, we can’t get away from the need to work with people.

Many thanks to LBS for hosting this event and to regional chair Barry Corless for organising. Check out the itSMF UK website for member events around the regions.