The 'whose-ass-to-kick?' identifier - SIAM in action from ServiceNow
- Summary:
- Any time there is problem with delivering a service, the chances are that a squabble will break out between a customer and its vendor suppliers as to which is responsible. Fingers will point and denials will be made. What is needed is hard evidence across the whole mix of hardware and software used, and that is what ServiceNow is looking to bring to the party.
Remember the Babel Fish Paradox idea that appeared on diginomica back in March? This is where the benefits of increasingly distributed applications can lead to a practical reality where managing the final delivery of business services becomes a quagmire of conflicting requirements.
What then becomes necessary is a 'Babel Fish' – that piscine universal translation tool created by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. In IT terms, this is a centralizing tool or service that pulls together the different strands of services and tools at points where it is both possible and sensible to provide a single management and storage capability.
It is a point where it is possible to give a business a single version of the truth as to what is really happening in its processes and operations. Without that, the increasing use of distributed – probably cloud-delivered – services means that many users end up thrashing around trying to work out what the hell is going on, rather than getting on with making money.
This paradox is clearly emerging now in service management. Businesses are increasingly using a mix of heterogeneous applications and tools, and the provision of a complex business process will involve several of them working collaboratively – and working well. It is part of life, however, that this does not always happen.
When something goes wrong, finding and fixing the problem has now become a major issue. Each tool will always have its own siloed information, siloed data, and incompatible or blocked communications. Often, the best that can happen is that only form of coherent `management’ is as emails between different service teams or tools vendors.
It is a problem that service management specialist ServiceNow is aiming to solve with its new Service Integration and Management (SIAM) toolset. The goal is to integrate all those different service capabilities into the archetypal management environment – a single pane of glass.
Indeed, it is to take it further and create a management environment where the tools can identify not only problem areas in the delivery of services, but the root causes of those problems and the teams – whether internal or within vendors contributing applications and tools – responsible for the problem.
The upshot here, is that ServiceNow is pitching at a toolset which can provide user businesses with real evidence of where the problem lies – be that internally or a specific vendor. That could be an excellent tool for resolving the traditional 'not our fault' arguments very quickly, and give businesses valuable information for any future application or service purchases, as Steve Siegel, ServiceNOW’s senior director of product marketing observes:
We have the data we can share with the vendors and give them the opportunity to improve, and if they can’t improve, we can go and find others. We can benchmark and compare performance and we get the visibility to ensure that our customers have the ability to manage the support requirements for their end customers.
Public sector roots
The original impetus for this development has come from the UK public sector, and in particular the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which has already started to implement the ServiceNow SIAM tools, with a view to both saving money and providing better service delivery through outsourcing at least some elements of their IT infrastructure.
According to Siegel, the ServiceNow platform has the capability to not only manage all that core capability of IT service management but also operations management, financial management, vendor management and contract management. The aim is a common platform where all of those service capabilities can be managed in one place, providing transparency to service delivery and workflow, and visibility on SLA attainment:
So it really gives the opportunity for a company to look at their service and supply chains, and decide: are these people performing? Are they meeting our contract needs? The sense I get from what I have been told is that it’s so difficult to manage that businesses don't do it. This means they should be getting discounts and paybacks on services from suppliers that are not living up to contract. But they don’t have the bandwidth to do it.
One thing that always comes up in situations like this is the question of working out whose ass needs kicking. I put it to Siegel that this is a tool many IT managers would love to have - the whose-ass-to-kick identifier! This appeals:
This is exactly that. We’ll have to put that in the marketing!
Flippancy aside, the key factor here is the ServiceNow SIAM provides a common platform that uses APIs to integrate with a wide range of other systems, so that it can exploit a number of different approaches to provide reporting and management across heterogeneous boundaries. This gives users the best options for their particular needs, such as using APIs to pass data between systems while using existing messaging services between them.
According to Siegel’s colleague on the SIAM project, Principal Solution Consultant David D’Agostino, this can lead to considerable savings in the operations budget:
The UK Cabinet Office reckons that if you do it right, you can shave out something like 40% off the cost of managing your IT estate. The assumption sometimes is that SIAM is all about day to day passing of incident records backwards and forwards, but actually it’s about contracts, it's about vendor management, it’s about managing the on-boarding process. One of the real costly and painful exercises, and the reason that people get locked into long term painful contracts, is once a supplier is on-board it's damn near impossible to get them out without a lot of pain and a lot of cost.
He suggests that the ServiceNow approach and its process engine helps to identify a failing supplier and disengage from them, making life a lot easier. The key is commonality. In other words, users want a consistent and harmonized way of dealing with all of those suppliers, instead of having to deal with them one at a time. The benefits are speed and the cost of integration going down. There is also far less ticket re-keying, a process which gives a big jump in costs, he argues:
That’s why it’s desirable to have everyone plugged into the same system. Instead of a million bits of paper, you could have something like this.
Drilling down may only hurt a bit
This is based on a component called Performance Analytics. It's not standard reporting, it’s actually taking daily sets of data which is used to do trend analysis, lead indicators and management. It can be used to identify where problems are occurring and, with drilling down, the nature and cause of the problem.
Further drill down can build up what D’Agostino refers to as a three-dimensional cube that defines the problem from a number of different directions in order to surface the cause of the problem. If that cause is internal then it can be addressed directly, but if it is caused by a supplier the cause, and the culprit, becomes immediately clear:
In addition, we’ve got a specific module that does actual vendor performance management for us. I'm not aware of any of our competitors that have anything like this. What we can then do is actually start looking at score cards and the rest of it. So I can take a look at the chart that shows me how 'hardware provider one' is performing against the whole range of different metrics, and see that he’s dropping into dodgy territory.
If I want to take a closer look I can see, because we’re collecting all that data, we have a history that tells us what's going on and we can see what the direction is, that they're actually getting worse in a whole range of different categories of measurement.
This does seem like a powerful tool and immediately raises an industry-wide possibility. This is a service of obvious value to not just ServiceNow’s customers, but the whole of the service management industry. This data could provide an annual survey of the best and worst hardware and software vendors when it comes to meeting SLAs, supporting customers and helping them to overcome problems.
Perhaps understandably, Siegel was not fully convinced:
That would be an interesting thing to do. It wouldn’t be a popular one, but….
My take
Yes, that last proposition would be unpopular, but if individual businesses can generate such data about their own suppliers it could prove invaluable for them, and really put the vendors on their mettle. Perhaps the real test of this may come when a set of lawyers are briefed to challenge the data, but till then the vendors need to remember where their toes are, for they may need to be on them.