These days, it’s standard for IT departments to rely on multiple suppliers and vendors to generate their end product or service. Ultimately, attaining their overarching IT delivery goals depends on keeping this multi-player landscape smoothly organised.
Imagine an IT scenario where all your suppliers have complete clarity on their roles, responsibilities and deliverables. Not only that: they take active pride and ownership of ensuring these are delivered on time, on budget and on par with the quality you expect. You’re in control of your multi-sourcing IT landscape, with total peace of mind that each of your suppliers is properly pulling their weight.
What’s more, silos will no longer be an issue. You and - more importantly - your IT customers will barely notice the silo setup is there, as your suppliers work cohesively across their operational areas. Each vendor can effectively communicate with its neighbours, reaching beyond an outdated, walled-in mentality. This will fuel collaboration not only to fix problems as they arise, but to prevent them from happening in the first place.
While this may sound utopic, the reality is closer than you think. Service Integration and Management (SIAM) is a methodology that’s designed to transform your multi-vendor landscape from the inside out, implementing and optimising governance, management, integration, assurance and coordination across your suppliers.
The benefits are clear, but SIAM roll-out is a complex matter: knowing where to start requires detailed knowledge of your current multi-vendor landscape. To get you there, we’ve devised a SIAM Quickscan that aims to provide a high-level overview of your current multi-sourcing strengths and weaknesses.
Covering 3 key pillars (Customer Focus, Service Integration and Management), the Quickscan is intended to provide insights into the maturity of your existing multi-vendor setup. Your results can then be channeled into a full assessment of your ‘as-is’ vendor landscape.
Now, the Service Integration and Management components of the Quickscan are self-explanatory. But what about Customer Focus? Below, we’ll shed light on how SIAM can specifically benefit your IT operations by recalibrating your Customer Focus.
SIAM: from vendors to customers
Given its potential for turning your internal multi-vendor landscape into a well-oiled machine, you could be forgiven for thinking that SIAM stops at revolutionising just the inner workings of your IT setup.
But in order to fully appreciate SIAM’s power, we need to consider not only its primary impacts, but the real reason you’re looking to optimise your IT landscape. Ultimately, it’s to deliver the best possible services and products, in the best possible way, to IT customers and employees who are as satisfied as possible with that experience.
Fundamentally, it’s your IT customers, as well as their workforce, that reap the rewards of fully functioning SIAM. True understanding of SIAM’s role in Customer Focus is, therefore, vital to leveraging its full potential.
Change on the inside, focus on the outside
When SIAM is properly implemented, it has the power to optimise your IT customers’ experience of your service delivery, from the inside out. However, this vital asset is often overlooked in the hyper-focus on SIAM’s potential for transforming internal business operations.
Yet this aspect of SIAM deserves far more floor time than it gets. In reality, SIAM’s potential to charm your IT customers each and every time they interact with your department is its true pay-off.
So, how do SIAM’s fundamentally internal transformations translate to your IT customers, as well as the employees that work with your IT services day to day?
Transparency sells
With proper governance comes real accountability. This not only means that - with SIAM deployed - vendors will have to assume proper responsibility for their (in)actions. It will also allow you to breathe real transparency into your operations.
Once you’ve leveraged SIAM to implement a truly collaborative and coordinated multi-vendor spirit, there’ll be no more hiccoughs brushed under the carpet. Any that were previously will soon be dug out and resolved, too.
This paves the way for real end-to-end ownership of service delivery across your suppliers, as well as the ability to swiftly and coherently address problems, should they occur. Of course, effective communication is a two-way street, with customer feedback vitally important in improving service delivery. In a SIAM landscape, your IT customers become active contributors who add to the co-creation of value.
Even though your IT customers themselves won’t see the day to day workings of your new, transparent multi-vendor landscape, the open, accountable and empowered culture it will foster will most likely influence their general impression of how your business operates.
Optimising customer experience is, of course, a delicate process that requires both time and fine-tuning. But it starts from fundamental understanding and insight - luckily, there’s a Quickscan for that.
SIAM for stability
Optimised management and coordination are a couple of SIAM’s key features, streamlining performance across all your suppliers. As reliable, predictable service delivery is put in place, you can wave a cheery goodbye to the fire-fighting that might be giving you grief right now.
With SIAM, effective management policies and a supplier culture that puts mutual benefit over finger-pointing ensure flare-ups will be few and far between. Plus, if sparks do start to fly, the SIAM framework ensures all parties work together to identify slick, speedy solutions.
The overall result is that your IT customer gets what they signed up for: reliable, predictable, punctual and high quality service delivery.
Stability and reliability also lay solid groundwork for productivity. That’s an instrumental factor in forging ongoing business relationships that revolve around your service delivery. After all, there’s nothing IT customers, or their employees, value more than an IT department they can trust to deliver real value for money.
Longer-term, the stability and reliability SIAM ensures also contribute another key business benefit. With SIAM ensuring solid, functional foundations, your organisation will be free to prioritise innovating for your customers' benefit.
Create space for customer-focussed innovation
Stability has its place in business success, yes. But so does groundbreaking creativity.
With a mature SIAM set-up in place, you and your suppliers will likely find you have extra time and brainspace on your hands. No longer huddled in non-communicative silos, duplicate busywork will trend downwards as collaboration escalates. With fewer fires to fight across the board, there’ll be time, energy and funds to hone in on both service delivery improvement and transformative innovation.
Granted, your suppliers are likely to gain an increase in job satisfaction in the process. But the real benefit lands squarely in the laps of your IT customers and their employees, as they experience ever-improved services and products.
Freeing up time and space for customer-focussed innovation is the end goal, and identifying existing immaturities in your multi-sourcing setup is the first step to getting there.
Ultimately, smooth multi-sourcing evolves IT customer experience
Transparency, stability, innovation and collaboration across the board. Each of these core benefits of SIAM implementation combine to create a vastly improved experience for your IT customers, leaving them feeling fundamentally valued and satisfied with their choice to opt for your service or product.
What’s more - with SIAM in full swing - your multi-vendor landscape will possess the strength and flexibility it needs to adapt to IT customer demand as required.
If you’re ready to implement SIAM in your business operations, you’ll find our no-obligation SIAM Quickscan a nifty tool to help you pinpoint where to start.
From there, Fruition Partners would be happy to carry out a full assessment to compile in-depth insights into your multi-sourcing setup. Adopting our signature pragmatic, informed and hands-on approach, we’ll then devise a SIAM roll-out strategy that’s specifically tailored to your business.
Are you ready to transform your relationships with your IT customers? Take the SIAM Quickscan.
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