SIAM supports Business Innovation

“Innovation generally refers to changing processes or creating more effective processes, products and ideas.

For businesses, this could mean implementing new ideas, creating dynamic products or improving your existing services. Innovation can be a catalyst for the growth and success of your business, and help you to adapt and grow in the marketplace. Being innovative does not only mean inventing. Innovation can mean changing your business model and adapting to changes in your environment to deliver better products or services. ……. Businesses that innovate create more efficient work processes and have better productivity and performance.”

Business.gov.au

Business Innovation (BI) ability is important, and the importance is accelerating! But not only is it important to innovate, it is also important how fast you can establish your innovations into operating businesses!

This blog will focus on how SIAM supports transformation of BI into implemented and operative IT-services.

A “good” example of BI, from the banking industry, is the massive demand for change to existing IT-services imposed by the business innovating towards internet banking. The industry did well in developing new products, processes, marketing channels e t c but had problems in changing and establish IT-services to support them. The obvious development was of course addressed by building websites and secure login functionality since these were IT-services close to, and directly used by, the business processes.

But IT-services to support banking products are so much more; middle office-, back office- and core systems, fraud detection, report engines, money transfer mechanisms etc etc – operated by a large and diversified infrastructure. All of it integrated into complex structures by interdependent IT-services and providers.

The rationale to use SIAM in transforming BI into IT services
Today almost every business activity is supported by IT. Hence, innovating your business and its products and processes will most probably demand for IT-services to change as well. A challenge to IT services and their provider is to be continuously agile to the business in a fast and ever-changing environment. And the fact that IT services today most often are multisourced, over a number of providers, does not simplify the task of business agility.

This is where SIAM will support BI! If SIAM is used to govern and manage multisourced IT services you will have obtained the ability to integrate multiple services into aggregated services. The same structures can be further established and reused to create a communicating vessel between the innovating business and all the different supporting IT-services and their providers.

Established SIAM will support BI through

• knowledge on which IT-services, and providers, supports which business processes
• ability to recognise and assess which services that have to change
• delivering consolidated cost estimates to support business case calculations
• responsibility to plan and coordinate the implementation of changed IT-services over various providers
• … and more

SIAM fundamentals that support BI transformation into operative IT-services

The SIAM model basics and fundamentals used for SIAM to support BI are the same as how SIAM supports and bridges different provider ITSM behaviours (further covered in the blogpost “SIAM supports bi-modal IT-services”). They are:

• “all service providers, including the integrator, uses a number of different types of assets to manage the delivery of services , a k a Service Management Architecture (SMA)”
• “every provider encapsulates its internal behaviors, interacting only through negotiated interfaces”
• “a service integrator has the responsibility to integrate multiple services into an aggregated outcome
• The assets used to build a SMA are within SIAM specified as:

• Tools and information – ITSM suites, CMDB, Knowledge management support, report engines, monitoring etc.
• Activities Processes, routines, methodologies etc.
• Documentation – contracts, agreements, policies, service descriptions etc
• Roles – , responsibilities, staffing, knowledge, skills etc
• Organization – units and functions, decision mechanisms, escalation routines, financing, reporting

The above stated together gives the following, depicted, situation:

How this fit into BI

There are many ways to configure your business organisation and conduct BI, but on a high level you will always use the same type of assets as IT-service providers do:

• Tools and information to keep track of new and ongoing BI initiatives
• Processes and routines to formally run BI activities
• Documentations and policies to support and govern
• Roles to secure accountability and responsibility
• Organisation to support decision making and financial control structures

Stretching the Integrator responsibility to also include integration of BI will then give us the following situation

As you can see, here the integrator role goes beyond delivering the aggregated service, entering as an asset within the business process. Responsibilities added to the integrator role are the effective and efficient transformation and bridging of BI into operating IT-services.

One of the natural ITSM capabilities to stretch and make use of in BI is of course the Continual Service Improvement domain (CSI). CSI momentum is normally acquired through existing, operative, IT-services and processes. This has to be enhanced and elaborated to also use BI as momentum.

This way the Business can be seen as a service provider itself within the SIAM environment, and the service it provides is innovation!

Relevant readings:

Title: SIAM: Principles and Practices for Service Integration and Management (english version)
ISBN: 9789401800259
Author(s): Dave Armes & Niklas Engelhart & Peter McKenzie & Peter Wiggers
Price: € 39,95 (VAT Tax.)

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