Variant configuration for IT-services and its impact on the service request fulfillment process

IT organizations are currently facing a trade-off between standardization and customer individuality. Standardization is onemeans to realize scale economies, is prerequisite to automate the delivery of IT-services and hence a possibility to cut costs.Best-practice frameworks like ITIL also drive the standardization efforts by defining IT-service catalogues and standardprocesses. Upcoming or rather ongoing trends like on-demand computing require standardization to assure efficientallocation of resources. But on the other hand customers of IT-services are confronted with increasing competition in theirbusiness that provokes individuality of their processes. Consequently IT-services must also be adjustable or customizable tomeet the customers’ needs. The resulting variety must be handled efficiently by the IT organization to stay or becomecompetitive. One means to cope with variety in the service request fulfillment process is variant configuration. In ourcontribution we discuss how variant configuration mechanisms can be applied on IT-services and what impact variantconfiguration has for the service request fulfillment process

Mass Customizing IT Service Agreements: Towards Individualized On-Demand Services

IT-service providers shall achieve both cost reduction in IT-operations and customer individuality inservice agreements. This article suggests applying the well known principle of mass customization tobalance individuality and standardization in service agreements. Dependent on the commitmentmodularity type, its employment may not only save time and resources at the point of customerinvolvement but also allow the predefinition of repeatable processes in IT-operations. We develop atypology for positioning and classifying IT-service providers as mass customizers of serviceagreements. This categorization is based on commitment modularity types and points of customerinvolvement in the IT-service life cycle. We identify four generic archetypes of IT-service providers’customization strategies and explain their characteristics by means of selected examples of actual ITserviceagreement situations. Finally, we introduce a service model that enables IT-service providersto implement one specific archetype with a great balance in standardization and individuality. Wetherefore propose to (1) strictly separate the design of services from contracting and usage stages, (2)modularize self-contained commitments and (3) productize options and changes of a serviceagreement. This model has been prototyped and developed in close cooperation with IT-serviceproviders and is currently applied for a pilot project

Definition and Classification of IT-Shared-Service-Center

Shared service centers (SSCs) are an increasingly important and oft-utilized approach to organizing Information Technology services. Nevertheless, researchers hitherto have not investigated SSCs sufficiently. Our research attempts to fill this gap by addressing the following basic problems: Firstly, no standardized definition of SSCs has established; and, secondly, different features of SSCs in practice have not been analysed. In an extensive literature review, we identified the following characteristics of SSCs to be commonly mentioned by researchers: consolidation of processes within the group; delivery of support processes; separated organizational unit; alignment with external customers; cost cutting as a major driver; focus on internal customers; and operation like a business. In a focus group, we identified the following parameters in which existing SSCs differ from each other: legal form; main form of co-ordination; service charges; external market; contractual form; center concept and product portfolio. These criteria were validated empirically by extensive case study research with seven IT-organizations from North America and Europe