You gotta love the acronym because it’s so darn ambiguous. How do people come up with these? Why not Idaho? Burma?

Moving on…the acronym SIAM is all about outsourcing, and the complexity of managing multiple external and internal service providers — in our case, within hospitals.

With the resurgence of hospital IT outsourcing, SIAM somehow seemed appropriate as an FAQ. So what is SIAM?

Research firms like Forrester and Gartner coined the SIAM term years ago because of their clients’ challenges in managing multiple service providers. Many outsourcing agreements have not achieved promised cost savings, service improvements, and innovation. And, according to Forrester’s Stephen Mann, “organizations are looking to a multi-supplier sourcing arrangement to address not only these deficiencies but to also reduce the risk of ‘being held to ransom’ by the constraints of a single-provider arrangement.”

Enter SIAM. “Service integration “(SI) is one half of the buzzword;  “and management ” (AM) pulls the acronym together. The focus is service management of multiple service providers, (multi-sourcing) whether external or internal.

According to Forrester “To make multisourcing arrangements effective, customers must get suppliers to work together, both from the commercial and operational standpoint. The services integration layer, comprising elements of process, tools, service-level agreements, and related structures, is absolutely critical to the success of these arrangements.”

SIAM’s focus is on meeting two distinct needs: sourcing and vendor management, and IT service management (ITSM). This requires the ability “to provide end-to-end visibility, reporting, and accountability for the services delivered by multiple suppliers,” according to Forrester.  SIAM’s approach acknowledges multiple domains; for example, if a hospital is outsourcing some services, but also manages in-house, SaaS, and cloud services, it should create an overall  structure for managing these disparate IT service providers to create seamless IT service delivery.

The SIAM model delivers several benefits:

• Improved governance and control of suppliers and services AND costs.
• Increased efficiency and effectiveness across IT service delivery.
• The potential to optimize value from suppliers.
• Better service and cost predictability.
• Greater flexibility to plug-and-play new suppliers into the SIAM ecosystem.

To discuss outsourcing IT functions, consider contacting us!