Multiprovider Management: SIAM Toolset

The service landscape has changed massively. With the increase in the digitalization of IT through increased use of automation and cloud services, a highly complex and highly fragmented system landscape has emerged, and there is also a growing number of external providers whose performance has to be coordinated. With the increase in business requirements, the volume of data, systems and contracts is also increasing. On the other hand, the size of the responsible IT organization remains the same - or is outsourced in whole or in part. The management of the IT, the procurement processes and the monitoring of the services of the involved suppliers place completely new requirements on the remaining company IT.

It is a new operating model (Target Operation Model, TOM ), which provides a shift away from infrastructure-focused management to a holistic service orientation. The holistic service is increasingly composed of controllable, technical components such as applications, databases, infrastructures and networks. The service is rather an aggregation of services (service towers), supplied by the different involved suppliers. In part, it is also a combination of internal, on-premise systems and external services - which makes their control not easier. Databases, infrastructures and networks. The service is rather an aggregation of services (service towers), supplied by the various involved suppliers. In part, it is also a combination of internal, on-premise systems and external services - which makes their control not easier. Databases, infrastructures and networks. The service is rather an aggregation of services (service towers), supplied by the various involved suppliers. In part, it is also a combination of internal, on-premise systems and external services - which makes their control not easier.

SIAM - Service Integration and Management

It is eminently important for an organization to clarify the role of internal IT in the case of a multiprovider strategy. Without a clear sourcing strategy and without clarifying the positioning of the remaining IT, a company will sooner or later face a host of external providers, which are not or very difficult to coordinate. Each supplier manages its service and the lifecycle of the integrated components autonomously, and it is difficult to provide coordination services in the case of major disturbances or complex changes if these can not be clearly assigned to it and its contract. Ultimately, the customer is confronted with difficultly controllable additional costs, which the suppliers want to have compensated for services outside their area of ​​responsibility.

Overview SIAM model

The role of the end-to-end service responsible for business must be clarified and the necessary governance structures established. SIAM - Service Integration and Management is currently the most frequently used concept, which provides the basis for a multiprovider operating concept. The model is specialized not only to ensure the integration and consistency of the service, but also to coordinate the management of the different suppliers, thereby minimizing the risk to the company and ensuring the overriding responsibilities through targeted incentives.  SIAM is therefore an operating model, which is made up of processes, governance principles, organizational structures, employees and also tool support.

In this blog post, I focus on the question of tool integration.

SIAM - Toolset Strategy

The SIAM operating model must ensure the provision of the services and the consistent execution of the processes at all involved technical service providers. This must be done at an integrated, automated level. Manual interfaces between the parties involved are simply unacceptable when it comes to dynamic and fast handling of changes, disturbance corrections or new instances. On the other hand, all providers can not be expected to use the same tools as the customer. When a company enters a multiprovider engagement, the question of tool integration becomes very central. Today, the IT tools are scattered within IT within the different departments, and their ownership is decentralized. A coordination of the tools and their integration often does not take place internally - let alone with the increasing external suppliers. This must change. When building a SIAM operating model, it also needs a toolset strategy that is geared to it. This will most likely result in the need to reconfigure or even replace existing tool environments.

The following 9 primary tool areas must be defined in a multiprovider environment and the requirements for the integration of service providers must be defined:

• Service management
• Service catalog management
• Software Asset Management and Discovery
• Identity and User Administration
• Monitoring & Event Management
• Service orchestration
• Service configuration & capacity management
• Performance Management & Service Reporting
• Software package management & release management

Each supplier has a dedicated service management system and appropriate tool support, if he is professionally trained. He will always want to use this to continue his service business. But the seamless integration of the offered services with its customers also requires an automatic integration of the management systems.

In the following, I would like to discuss the essential requirements of the individual tool areas, which customers should consider when developing the tool strategy in the multiprovider environment:

A) Service management

The use of an integrated service management tool is central to any service management system implementation. Workflow processes such as incident management, problem management, change management and configuration management are essential for efficient service operation.

SIAM ITSM Integration

When integrating external vendors with their own tools, it is important that standard APIs be used to provide seamless linking. The real-time exchange of incident, problem or change tickets between different systems is a prerequisite as these processes often involve several suppliers. From the point of view of the SIAM model, the status and assignment of the process steps must be monitored at any time. There is usually a single source of record data under the control of the service integrator. However, a clarity of the data integration editor has to be defined, which data is stored where and who can see which data.

This is especially true when defining the CMDB data structure and the CIs to be managed. This requires a clear clarification and definition of the CI attributes, relationships and the defined statuses and the processes for maintaining the data. If possible, it should be avoided that the supplier first maintains its own CMDB, and only afterwards the SIAM CMDB. This can lead to problems of integrity, which lead to considerable overhead, false estimation and delays in service operations.

Another challenge is the definition of clear definitions in the field of priorities definitions, service groups, risk categories and so on. If suppliers use different names, which is often the case, appropriate translations are to be ensured.

B) Service catalog management and request fulfillment

Internal IT is increasingly taking the role of the service broker and ensuring the integration of defined cloud services. This requires a central service portal in which the service catalogs of the company's own organization as well as the various external suppliers are integrated and are offered to the business user for subscribing to subscribe services. Changes to the service offer or change of service providers should be ensured seamlessly in this central portal without affecting the user's use - and not to be referred to new portals.

A service catalog is also important in that the end-to-end service view with all its suppliers, interfaces and responsibilities involved can be represented centrally.

Many service offers are displayed as service requests to be retrieved. The tools must be able to map complex workflows, which allow the assignment of tasks to different internal and external parties. In many cases, other tools must be triggered by suppliers.

SIAM Toolintegration

If end-to-end workflows can not be realized across the entire Supplier Eco system, manual work steps or data transfers are necessary, which greatly slows down the run. There is also the risk of misapplication.

C) Software Asset Management and Discovery

In the context of cloud integration, the management of the hardware components will become less important. On the other hand, the software assets and in particular the licenses used must be monitored. As a rule, the suppliers assign the responsibility for the use of the software to the customer and therefore also the obligations laid down in the software use agreements.

In addition, it must be ensured that a consolidation can take place in the management of software authorizations and the use of data by several suppliers.

It is recommended that the SIAM organization use a central software asset management tool which is able to receive and analyze data from the suppliers - and thus represent the company's position when using the software solutions.

Data integrity in the SIAM environment

A corresponding solution can also be a discovery tool, which can serve during the initial filling of the CMDB. This can lead to greater discussions, as most suppliers insist on their own tools and refer to their trained employees who have these in their hands. It is important, however, as already mentioned under «Service Management», to define a clear scoping of the data and to determine which data will be kept where. To do this, you differentiate between data that is stored by the SIAM provider (retained tool) or data that is located at the provider.

D) Identity and User Administration

It is all about the central question: how can I ensure that only the person who accesses data and services is actually entitled to do so? How do I determine who accessed what when and where? So it's all about the digital identity of people, devices, and things connected to the company. The identities and their assigned authorizations are the new perimeters, which each company will deal with centrally. Not only the authorizations are linked to identities, but also all personal data that require special protection. If customers are left behind by the use of our services, they will automatically be linked to their protection. Corresponding regulators are in the starting holes and will deal with us as well as above all all cloud service providers. Read my blog post ( Identity - the new perimeter ).

The management of roles, rights and identities must remain with the company itself. Solutions must support the current security concepts and the inheritance of rights must be supported by suppliers. The IAM solution for SIAM operation must at all times be able to withdraw rights and monitor the use of identities - across the entire Supplier Eco system.

E) Monitoring & Event Management

The status of the services and monitoring of the statuses in the entire Supplier-Eco system is a central requirement in order to react in time. If an infrastructure fails anywhere in the system, it can impact other service components from other vendors, or even disrupt the overall service. The SIAM organization needs a monitoring and event correlation tool to recognize these situations in time and to react efficiently and effectively.

Here, too, clarification of the CMDB data and its responsibility is important because, as a rule, the events are linked to the components to be responsible. The dependency of the services on the service towers from external suppliers must be correctly represented in the CI relationships in the CMDB.

F) Service orchestration

Especially when using cloud services, one can no longer go without an orchestration tool. An orchestrant includes, on the one hand, automated workflows for integrating the various components from the cloud and also locally (on-premise). In a heterogeneous multiprovider environment, this is relatively complex because the components are required to be deployed at several sites and have to be triggered via defined processes in the cloud environment. This is to ensure that the configurations are correctly stored and the usage is simplified.

SIAM Enterprices Service Management

When choosing the solution, it is important that the workflows are defined in advance and the necessary information flows are clarified. Here the requirements for the workflows are best recognized and determined in the evaluation of the appropriate tool.

G) Service configuration & capacity management

When services are purchased, the only thing to be paid is what you actually use. This is one of the great advantages in the cloud service environment, because no more expensive infrastructure projects have to be done: «Pay as you use».

To ensure that the operating costs are not driven up to a high level, it is now important to monitor and control the capacities. In a service-tower environment, it is important to understand the impact of resource bottlenecks on the entire service. The data must be consolidated and ready for decision-making.

Unused capacities should be released as quickly as possible and the operating costs should be relieved. This is a large potential savings especially in large development environments if test and integration environments have to be provided only in a targeted manner. Even the release of surroundings over the weekend can lead to considerable savings.

H) Performance Management & Service Reporting

One major problem within the SIAM organization is uniform service reporting and performance monitoring. Each supplier creates their own reports, which can not be easily correlated. In addition, the measured KPIs are not uniform - and if not determined by the SIAM organization - difficult to understand.

SIAM service accounting

A central reporting system is therefore a major relief and belongs to the tools of a SIAM organization. The measurement criteria and the data to be supplied form an integral part of the service relationship with the suppliers. Reporting should include both commercial aspects, supplier services, service volumes used, and end-to-end service delivery. As a rule, data from the Service Management Tool is also integrated.

I) Software package management & release management

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI / CD) are currently the keywords of an agile IT organization. The pressure for more frequent releases and faster as well as better software solutions means high automation of the build, test and deployment processes. Accordingly, tools must be able to support these integral functions as part of a Multiprovider Eco system.

SIAM Aggregated

Again, the tool is not important, but the basic principles and co-operation culture. Ultimately, tools must support these principles and integrate external suppliers.