As we promised, the SIAM Health Assessment is now live!
Up until now, we have published three blogs “From the Architect’s Desk” written by Michelle Major-Goldsmith and Simon Dorst on which they explained our wish for this assessment and the idea behind it, how the assessment was created, and as well our overview of the SIAM Health Assessment and its use for organisations.
But let’s start from the beginning and try give you a summary of everything regarding the SIAM Health Assessment.
First, why the SIAM Health Assessment?
When you are doing any kind of improvement it is important to start where you are and the SIAM Health Assessment is all about improvements. In other words, understanding what you are currently doing can help you to create a snapshot, identify and prioritise specific problem areas, and also consider what good would/should/could look like and monitor progress towards that. Like your own health, a SIAM environment is something that needs constant attention, regular check-ups and continuous improvement.
The SIAM Health Assessment can be used:
• when considering the benefits of SIAM to undertake a current state assessment to determine what exists • following the implementation of a SIAM model, to determine the next iteration or improvement
• during the operation of a SIAM ecosystem, especially when issues become apparent, here it can help to diagnose these shortcomings and offer suggestions for improvement.
Secondly, how was the SIAM Health Assessment created?
Let us explain a little about how the assessment was created. Similar to the creation of the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge, Scopism and our lead architects Michelle Major-Goldsmith and Simon Dorst from Kinetic IT assembled a team of subject matter experts from all over the world, who happily committed their own time and knowledge. And we are very grateful for having the opportunity to be working with them!
From these we appointed smaller author teams to focus on the actual creation of content, like the questions, level descriptions and guidance.
Our first creation-cycle was to develop SIAM-specific yet still generic descriptions for each of the levels and to determine the topics within each practice to be assessed. We could then create specific descriptions of each level for each topic.
Based on these descriptions, specific guidance could be created that would show an organisation, that achieved one level, how to get to ‘the next level’ and this guidance could then be linked to the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge to provide further content.
Who is it for?
The SIAM Health Assessment comes in TWO layers, which provide a progressive level of scope and detail. The first level or layer of the SIAM Health Assessment is to be used by … well everyone, it’s more or less a self-assessment.
This assessment is available online, which means it has to be about simplicity. It can’t take too long to complete, and we’ve tried to assure this by not only having the ‘lower’ levels assessed, using enhanced answer options (rather than just yes/no) but also not including the half-levels in this assessment.
But, in the second layer of the SIAM Health Assessment, consultants play a role.
-“This assessment is also available through Scopism, but only to selected consultants across the world (at this stage those that have been involved in the creation of this assessment). The expectation is that the consultant will play a key role in facilitating the assessment for an organisation, perhaps through a workshop and thus involving more people, from different parts of the organisation (and different layers of the SIAM model)”
Michelle Major Goldsmith and Simon Dorst in their blog series “From The Architect’s Desk”.
What about the outcome?
The main outcome of the SIAM Health Assessment is the well-known spider- or radar-chart. This is a great pictorial, one-page representation where peaks and troughs indicate strengths and weakness, leading to priorities and areas of concern, without any text or detail. There is also an ‘average’ per practice indicator, which does the same but at a higher level.
We are confident that this assessment will help respondents focus on looking at what is really important in considering SIAM ecosystems; customer satisfaction, service outcomes and building an environment where all of the service providers, the service integrator and the customer organization work in an integrated and collaborative way. You can find everything about the outcome of the SIAM Health Assessment from Michelle and Simon’s blog.
And finally, and this is the beauty of most of the SIAM artefacts, this assessment is free, available through our website.
Remember, the assessment is an accompanying service that extends its content to provide a practical, real-life, organisation specific health assessment meaning this is about considering the health status, looking at overall condition, specific pain-points etc.
