Kundenorientierte Gestaltung und Vereinbarung standardisierter IT ...

Page 3 of 12 18th European Conference on Information Systems
2 ADAPTING MASS CUSTOMIZATION TO IT-SERVICE AGREEMENTS
Mass customization has become a common principle for industrial manufacturers to meet varying
customer demands and achieve competitive costs. Its adaption to the design of service agreements has
several potential advantages. Firstly, selecting and reusing instead of developing new commitments
and agreements reduces time-to-market and development cost (Ulrich & Ellison, 1999). The
customization of agreements saves time and resources at the point of customer involvement. Secondly,
predefined submissions allow the pre-engineering of processes of provisioning and therefore enable
cost-efficient, standardized, documented, optimized and repeatable IT-operations. Spreading the
arising pre-engineering costs across several offerings and capturing economies of scope and of
learning are further effects (Ulrich, 1995). Equally important is the possibility to permanently adapt a
closed service contract to new requirements throughout its life-cycle without endangering the
standardized and cost-efficient provisioning of the service (Baldwin & Clark, 1997).
These aspects are also outlined by Piller’s three level of mass customization (Piller, 2002): Adapted to
our scope, the aim of mass customization is to address a large market and meet the needs of every
individual demander with regard to certain service characteristics (differentiation option) at costs that
correspond to standard mass services (cost option) while building up an ongoing relationship with
each customer (relationship option). This implies amongst others, that variety and customization are
distinct and, to ensure the latter, the customer must be involved in shaping the service agreement
(Mintzberg, 1988). Therefore, the point of customer involvement in the production cycle is one of the
two basic key indicators of the degree or type of customization provided (Duray et al., 2000). The
second is the method of achieving customization under cost restrictions. Specifically, it is the type of
modularity employed, since modularity is the key to achieving mass customization (Pine, 1993). In the
following we analyze these key dimensions of customization to group types of customization later on.
2.1 Modularity
Mass customization requires modular architectures to achieve economies of scale and scope (Blecker
et al., 2006). Defining modular components that are configurable into different varieties of a service
and its service agreement allows individuality, cost reduction and reduced delivery times
(McCutcheon et al., 1994). In literature, different types of modularity have been distinguished to
provide customized end products (Pine, 1993; Ulrich & Tung, 1991; Duray et al., 2000): swapping
(switch options), bus (add to existing base), mix (combine while using unique identity), sectional
(arrange to a unique pattern), cut-to-fit (alter dimensions before combining) and sharing (design
around common base unit) modularity. Due to the intangibility of services, the characteristics of bus
and mix modularity as well as those of cut-to-fit and sharing modularity may be combined. Based on
that, we adopt these types to the modularity range of intangible service agreements and differentiate
between swapping, option, sectional and sharing modularity as shown in Figure 1a.
The commitment swapping modularity represents the possibility to switch between variants of a
commitment. One of the variants has to be chosen. A typical example is the choice between defined
service levels like “silver” versus “gold”.
An option modularity allows adding additional commitments to an existing agreement base.
Additional commitment modules are selectable from a list of options. The selection of an additional
commitment like for example a 24/7 support will influence the service as a whole. Some of those
optional commitments can be added several times with different parameters.
The sectional modularity focuses on arranging commitment modules to a new service agreement.
Consider the arrangement to commit daily reports and continuous monitoring. Commitmentarrangements
may either be restricted by predefined combining rules or be allowed unrestrictedly.
The latter allows more efficient designing of new service agreements but lacks certainty that such a
new agreement would be able to be provisioned based on standardized processes.