Elevating Service Experience Transformation for Enterprises Leveraging SIAM

Claire Agutter: My name's Claire Agutter. I'm the director and founder at Scopism. We are delighted that Infosys is working with us to sponsor the Global SIAM community. Their support allows us to create a collaborative space for SIAM practitioners to connect and gives us the opportunity to share whitepapers, case studies and more based on the real world experiences of organizations like Infosys.

Thank you both for joining us. Can you please introduce yourselves?

Vikram Madhavan: Thank you. Claire. Lovely having you here with us. Thanks for the opportunity. I'm Vikram Madhavan, I come with over a couple of decades of experience and within Infosys I’m about 11 plus years of experience. I've worn various hats within the Cloud Infrastructure Services organization, it varies from solution creation, to implementation, consulting, product, advisory services, etc.

Today, I head the Service Integration and Management practice within the organization, and we have multiple customers that I am trying to do my best service. That is about me. I've got my colleague here.

Chetan Vikas: Thank you. Chetan this side, So I have an overall experience of close to 15 plus years. I started my career with service management domain itself. I was an Incident manager to begin with. After ten years working within the service management domain, I was leading a particular project where I was a service management leader.

Currently, I'm part of Infosys COE and I'm leading that initiative from a solution perspective and also churning out new documents, solutions and also new articles related to the same. Thank you.

Claire Agutter: Fantastic. It's great to have you both here, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about the Infosys perspective on SIAM and how it's evolving.

At Scopism, we see SIAM growing and maturing around the world. At Infosys, you work with many different clients, you share best practices and lessons learned. So, what inspired Infosys to focus on SIAM as a core capability of its service offerings?

Vikram Madhavan: That's a very important question, Claire. Thanks for that. I think SIAM, until the Book of Knowledge was published by Scopism, it is not that this was something new, this was something that we, over the past couple of decades or so have been in one or other capacity delivering it. Like I said, I used to be heading the presales practice at one point for the service experience transformation journeys for our customers, as part of this practice, there are several requirements that talks about processes, implementation of tools and putting things in perspective, what I used to see as an inquiry until 2015- 2016 of multi-vendor coordination or running the service integration processes across multiple sub vendors, multiple third parties was two out of ten, and it was more of an inquiry until 2016, and then the trends started changing rapidly and thanks to of course you Claire, and Scopism due to the book of knowledge that was published, general knowledge on the difficulties around managing multi vendors, the framework that got published, and also the adoption by our customers, instead of choosing a single vendor or a single partner to deliver pretty much all their IT services, customers also became very aware of the strengths that each of the vendors brings to the table. So, there was more and more adoption of multiple vendors. There was a set of vendors providing various services, so it became even more important. So, what was two out of ten customers inquiring about multi-vendor management until 2016, plus minus, became eight or nine customers asking us for these specific requirements. So, an inquiry became a requirement. Two out of ten became nine out of ten, and eight out of ten kind of a scenario. And then we see it maturing at the same time. So, it was very important as a capability, we set it up as a standalone core practice. Until then, the world was practicing, we had individual tracks or individual business offerings taking care of their individual processes, you know, plugging into what we call the customer’s governance layer. So that was not any more attending to the ultimate business goals or ensuring that we have everything running smoothly. And more importantly, putting business, and experience at the front. So, putting all this in a perspective, it was very important that we consolidate this practice, bring together the skills, and divert our investments towards developing this capability.

Chetan Vikas: So, if you talk about challenges, I think it also boils down to what model of SIAM that you have implemented for a particular customer. You will face a different challenge of governance and compliance in a hybrid model compared to a lead supplier model. Few standard challenges that we keep seeing in different projects are related to collaboration, acceptance of governance, or a service integrator as a layer, adoption of the framework. these are top challenges that we have seen in implementing and running the SIAM operations for our customers. The way Infosys take care of this is to first make sure that we do OCM in all the stages of our program. We start with OCM, during the design phase we do OCM, and in operation we do a very effective OCM. We have really learned, you can say in a hard way to do OCM at all levels, because if we are able to effectively make everybody more inclusive of this particular transformation in the service management domain, the adaptability of the process would be really high. If you don't do it, you will face a lot of challenges in adoption of the framework itself, that is the first element, then being considered as a neutral party in the service integrator role is also very critical. And this is not that customers see you as a neutral party, but also supplier ecosystem, the different vendors that you would be managing or you would be reporting to, they also should see you as a neutral party at the end of the day. So, with these elements, it helps us to go ahead and run SIAM in a more effective manner in a multi-supplier environment.

Claire Agutter: Good to think about SIAM as a means to an end rather than the end itself. In the community, we're having lots of conversations about SIAM as part of a move to a different operating model within an organization. In the context of wider digital transformation initiatives, how is Infosys incorporating SIAM principles to enable agility, scalability, and flexibility in IT service delivery for its customers?

Vikram Madhavan: Interesting question that, Claire. I think I would, give a two part answer to this, one ofcourse as SIAM capability, as part of our SIAM functions, you know, our center of excellence, how we attend to our customer’s business outcomes, the continual improvement that we would like to drive, the center of excellence that we have arranged within the service integration practice, how it attends to developing newer solutions. You spoke to my lead as part of this call, we've been interacting on that front as well and also how we drive some of the productization that enables the multi-vendor improvements and things like that. So, we're also talking about frameworks that attends to various segments and various regulatory needs or various framework within the segments that individual business sectors talk about. How we are trying to adopt to it and generate a framework that is going to be constantly developing and reshaping as we progress in the IT world. So that is one part that we take care to attend to the agility depending on our customers’ needs.

The second part of the answer is how we, as Infosys, have been thriving to drive our customer’s business outcomes through few initiatives. A couple of them I would certainly call out, one is Topaz, Infosys Topaz is the generative AI substitute or how we attend to some of these automation possibilities, how we are fast entering and running and driving in the customer space out there in this generative AI basis. So, we have a separate investment that is going at a very high corporate level in depth that is contributing to a lot of factors that comes together to deliver success to our customers. I would also like to mention about Infosys Cobalt, Infosys Cobalt is a force multiplier I would say, it puts in power pack cloud-based solutions. It could be for cloud first capabilities for some of the native ones or the newer trends, or somebody who is adopting newly to give a seamless experience, whether it is private, public cloud or hybrid across landscape, it could be PAAS, SAAS, IAS, etc. So all of this comes together to how we thrive to provide enhanced digital experiences to our customers or improve productivity and attending to the business availability as ultimate goal. The focus or the central point of everything we have been doing has moved on to ultimately what our customer wants to achieve as part of their end business. Everything else has become a support function. So that is how Infosys has adopted the space and we are trying to thrive, deliver the best results possible for our customers.

Claire Agutter: Within the Scopism SIAM community, we're hearing about SIAM evolving in different ways. So, for example, enterprise SIAM and SIAM for smaller organizations as well, what are the emerging trends and innovations that Infosys sees shaping the future of SIAM and the service management domain?

Vikram Madhavan: Great question that Claire. I think we would split that into two-dimensional answer, one from the SIAM perspective, another from an outside, rather outside in view to it. I think the SIAM aspect, would you like to take that forward, Chetan?

Chetan Vikas: Sure Vikram. So, we have seen some consistent trends within the SIAM implementations, and these trends are getting reported to us from both channels, our current customer, and from new opportunities that we have. One thing that is becoming very evident is organization wanting to move from ITIL 3 to ITIL 4 and this is not specifically around SIAM, but also having a caveat of service management to it. So, organization wants to actually move from ITIL 3 to 4 and not only from a changing of from a process to practice standpoint, but also how does that impact their operations. So they would like to see what is the value proposition of moving from ITIL 3 to 4 and they want to make that informed decision when to time it also. The next thing that we are seeing is around the introduction of new technologies impacting SIAM implementations, and how we go ahead and perform our day to day activities, elements like artificial intelligence, GenAI, how GenAI could help SIAM or this function of service integrator to perform their day to day work, how could they help in performing a better governance, better compliance at the end of the day. Can GenAI help to go ahead and do a better performance measurement and reporting for our customers? So these are some consistent trends that we are seeing in service management and SIAM domain itself. Over to you Vikram.

Vikram Madhavan: Thank you, Chetan. And I think that's a good inside-out perspective from the SIAM angle. So, appreciate it.

I'd like to throw in the perspective more from the digital aspects, and other aspects of how we appreciate some of these requirements from our customers. It is very important that we attend to seamless management of the premise, or the cloud-based IT applications for our customers, how we manage some of the infrastructure services, how we optimize the cost for our customers end of the day, improving the capabilities across the spectrum when one customer comes into our services. Knowing Infosys, we attend to various aspects of IT services as a corporate and then how we bring in across leveraging of skills, how we engage into upskilling of our assets, which are our employees, and how we provide best in class architecture to our customers. There could be the predictive aspects, the Generative AI and stuff like that or other frameworks that are applicable to various service delivery that we perform for our customers. So as a larger perspective, all of this culminate into how we provide an improved net promoter score, improved employee experience to our customers, and how we bring the business command center to be able to deliver continuous delivery of their targets to their end customers. So that way we are able to attend to inside-out and outside-in perspective to our customers out there.

Claire Agutter: Thank you both so much for sharing your insights. It's been really great to hear the Infosys perspective on how SIAM is evolving, and I appreciate you taking the time to be with us today.

Vikram Madhavan: Absolutely. Claire, thank you and really appreciate you having us here.

Chetan Vikas: Thank you, Claire.