Kundenorientierte Gestaltung und Vereinbarung standardisierter IT ...

vi Abstract
Abstract
Requirements for information technology (IT) based services have experienced great
changes in the past couple of years. Traditionally, IT services are developed, implemented
and expensed based on the demand of single customers. Due to rising pressure
in competition and costs, today IT organizations increasingly strive for improvement
in efficiency by industrializing the offering, order processing and provision of IT services.
However, highly individual requirements of the IT service to be provided in the
customer’s business restrict the ability to standardize IT services. Moreover, the necessity
for structuring the predominantly resource driven IT service offering towards a
consumer oriented portfolio becomes apparent: instead of separately offering server
capacities, network connections or licenses, a customer oriented IT Service Management
would include the overall responsibility to ensure functionality at the consumers’
point of the customers’ organization. Therefore, the IT service offering is required to
be aligned with the customers’ business objects and processes in order to archive desired
transparency in benefits for the cost of IT services provided.
The work at hand focuses on the challenge of specifying a customer and consumer
oriented IT service offering and individualizing it while still maintaining a substantial
degree of IT operational standardization. For this purpose, the thesis introduces a methodical
concept of IT service specification and stipulation. Four integrated method
parts are described in regards to their activities and results, their supporting techniques
and tools as well as their data structures and roles involved. The scope of the method
includes the topics of IT service specification and documentation as well as IT service
agreements and requests and the continuous adjustment of service relationships.
The method parts have been conceptionalized and implemented in several projects executed
with cooperating IT organizations. This work is reported as a cumulative dissertation
and is divided into two parts. Part A summarizes the setting and results of the
research work; part B includes ten publications providing more detail of diverse aspects
of the suggested method.