Markus Muller contributed to the development of the SIAM Health Assessment, here he looks back at 18 years of conducting assessments in various roles, countries and industries. He explains the real advantages he has seen, not simply from glossy brochures, but rather, from experience and insight about what assessments have accomplished for the organizations he has worked for.
Thank you Markus for sharing this blog with us!
Last year Gartner attested that the service integrator “…continues to move up the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ as client adoption increases”[1]. This means a need for higher maturity in coordination and integration of hybrid service providers in a services ecosystem is required.
Coordination and facilitation between suppliers work best when it is based on well understood dynamics, dependencies and connections. Having factual information about the state of the environment gathered from quality data sources is fundamental to this. Having access to information that is based on data and supports informed decisions about what the roadmap to design, implement and run a SIAM environment should look like for a specific organization, is exactly what a SIAM assessment can do for that organization.
But before I talk about the SIAM Health Assessment, let me share my thoughts on assessments generally. I’ve had many years of experience with assessments of all kinds. What I don’t like and certainly didn’t want to see with the SIAM assessment is some kind of restrictive template, a one size fits all approach that considers elements in isolation and doesn’t account for all of the features necessary in a SIAM ecosystem. Or an assessment that ignores environment, culture and unique organizational characteristics.
In my experience, most assessments focus only on one organization, whereas SIAM ecosystems are complex, with many moving parts so that approach would never be of value. For me, it had to be a holistic approach that takes into account all the components that make up excellent management practices for a SIAM environment. The assessment needed to consider the whole ecosystem, all of the layers, the customer, the providers and the service integrator, and how each work together within that ‘one team’ environment.
And then there is the questioning style. The simple yes/no answer options usually don’t do justice to understanding the complexity of multi-provider environments. When using assessments in the past I have found many different discussions can arise around a single question. If the questions are not easy to understand and to the point, and don’t allow for more nuanced responses, we risk a belief that the assessment isn’t capable of probing correctly, that is a waste of time, leaving the assessment participants with the feeling that their valuable time is not well invested. Instead, the questions that are asked must be open-ended and enrich the participants’ thinking as well as implicitly convey know-how.
A quality assessment that is built on the best practice guidance from the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge, provides a baseline to be able to track an organization’s SIAM status. Our SIAM Assessment will be useful, whether you are just starting to Plan & Build your SIAM ecosystem, if you`re in the middle of the transition, Implementing your SIAM modeland need a checkpoint, or in Run & Improve demonstrating progress and improvements made.
The value of performing an assessment
It is an old saying, but a true one, that we must first understand the baseline from which we are starting before we can understand how to get to where we want to be. An assessment helps reduce risk in the early stages of transformation planning, for both the integrator and the customer organization, and experience suggests that this effort pays dividends when determining progress toward a defined vision for the customer organization.
Speaking of strategy, I personally find that the assessments I’ve led in the past have contributed positively towards sorting through various stakeholder opinions and helps to establish some clear priorities for improvement.
The SIAM assessment that we have developed will prioritize activities within an improvement approach based on the best practice guidance within the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge. This supports improvement across the key practice areas, people, process, tools, measurement and governance and strategy, so it really does provide for a holistic review and improvement planning initiative.
There is another important element that I have always found valuable about assessments: By checking an organization’s current practice against the documented practices in the SIAM BoKs, we can assure that these good practices provide the guardrails to elevate the organization to the next level of maturity without having to reinvent the wheel. The SIAM guidance is based on real world experience, with contribution of over 40 SIAM practitioners from across the globe. An assessment can truly help an organization understand how well it is functioning and how the incorporation of service integration is enabling business benefit for the customer.
The ability to benchmark against known success factors for a SIAM environment, and the ability for an organization to review its own progress is what we hoped to achieve with the SIAM Health Assessment, and it is in my view that this can be a strategic asset when used in this way.
My consultant colleagues may not all agree with assessments and indeed, our development team had much debate about what we wanted to create and what we didn’t. The achievement of a ‘maturity level’ or ‘number’ was definitely not what we wanted. Our focus was on creating a tool that could be used to plan for improvements, wherever a customer organization was in their SIAM journey.
One of the great benefits of our assessment is that it can be done quickly and simply as a ‘DIY’ of self-assessment to get a baseline of health very quickly. If a deeper dive, consultant led assessment is required, this is possible too. The well-conceived questioning approach allows a guided assessment and expertise from the consultant to create a much more thorough review and improvement plan.
Both options work well depending on what an organization is hoping to achieve. In my view, the self-assessment effort has always paid off in advance of an external assessment to scale the external assessment so that not all areas need to be assessed in a 360-degree lengthy manner, but the level of detail of the assessment of individual SIAM competencies can be adjusted to the results that the self-assessment brought to light.
The organization that I currently work for uses assessments for many of the reasons I have mentioned here. However, there is one more good reason worth mentioning: by undertaking periodic assessments you can really track improvements. The nature of a SIAM ecosystem requires a customer organization`s governance, risk and compliance function to assure internal and external standards are being followed and good practices are developed and executed consistently across the SIAM ecosystem against these standards. Having an ongoing assessment can really help to achieve this and execute on corporate assurance responsibilities in context of governance, risk and compliance.
A few final words…
I personally see the benefits when talking to internal and external auditors who also compare what we do within our SIAM ecosystem against other industry practices such as COBIT. The section about COBIT and SIAM in our (opens in a new tab)”>BoKs <see Professional BoK section 2.3.3> explains more about how close both are in terms of principles, framework, and management practices.
I am delighted to have contributed to developing this SIAM Health Assessment. It is a true example of community contribution, making our insight and knowledge accessible and truly ‘walking the talk’ for our industry!
About the author:
Markus Müller is responsible for GRC competency development at ABB for Corporate IS. Previously he built and led the IT Integrator at ABB and is a long term member of the board of the Austrian itSMF. Markus enjoys an industry-wide reputation as a thought leader in Service Integration and Management (SIAM). His passion for SIAM led him to co-found Blueponte.com after 29 years in IT. Blueponte provides SIAM tools and skills in the form of training, consulting and managed services. He has been part of the SIAM authoring team since the beginning when we worked on developing the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge. Assessments on SIAM competencies are familiar territory for him as he was responsible for SIAM services such as assessment delivery in one of the global consultancies, before moving to a global corporate organization to not only talk about and assess SIAM environments, but to live and breathe it every day in his role as ‘Head of SIAM’.
[1] Hype Cycle for ITSM, 2020, Gartner: Published 27 July 2020 – ID G00441600
