Partners and suppliers

This dimension covers the view to partners and suppliers, who handle parts of services or share the process of development or maintenance of service and the relationship with them. These suppliers and partners could support any steps of design, development, deployment, delivery, support, and continual improvement of services. The organization will have some kind of agreement or contract with those suppliers in order to achieve the best performance of services. 

The factors below affect the approach of the organization toward a relationship with its partners and suppliers: 

• Organizations strategy about outsourcing or in-house development and maintenance of different services or some parts of them. 
• Organizational culture in making the decisions on choices.  
• Amount of efficient resources in an organization. Note that Human resources are also resources. The important question is, how many resources or human skill sets are needed for servicing? 
• Financial considerations. How much does it cost if making that with different suppliers or doing it in-house?  
• Political, governmental, social rules, or considerations. 
• Using the experiment of suppliers. Is that riskier to use a supplier which is more expert on a subject or do it by a less experimental team? 
• Amount of permanency and durability of services. Are the demands of services being temporary or fixed?  

The organization uses a method called Service integration and management (SIAM) to manage the coordination between services offered by different suppliers and the integrations of them. This activity can be performed by the organization or it can be outsourced to an external trusted partner.