A Consumer Needs-Driven Approach for Finding IT-Service Bundles

Today, IT-support for enterprises is increasingly delivered as a commercial service. Consequently, IT-service provisioning requires at least two enterprises, a seller and a buyer. Moreover, the seller itself can often be considered as a network of enterprises, jointly satisfying an IT-need of a buyer, thereby utilizing each other strengths. In this paper, we contribute an ontologically well-founded methodology called eservice for creating multi-supplier IT-service bundles that satisfy customer IT-needs. Such IT-needs, actually being high level problem statements that often require multiple IT-services to cover (hence the term bundle), are often too ill-defined to find specific IT-services for, thus requiring a systematic approach to finding these solutions. The main idea behind eservice is to conceptualize established ideas from service marketing literature, with the ultimate aim to generate a bundle of IT-services semi-automatically starting from a vague customer need. This paper focuses itself on a systematic analysis of a customer need, or: how to gradually arrive from a vague problem statement to specific IT-services covering this problem statement. We illustrate this process by using findings from a case study performed with an industry partner.