Investigating business needs fluctuations on IT delivery operations

Abstract

The management of IT services is increasingly driven by the necessity of cost reduction and quality improvement. As a result, new organizational models have been created and implemented aiming at achieving economies of scale, while improving customer satisfaction and experience has been one of the main focuses of recent research in Service Science. In this context, translating business elements and necessities of customers into IT components of service operations is a challenging and key task that can affect the long-term relationship between customers and IT provider. Further, market fluctuations and peaks that affect the business of customers of IT outsourcing shall, carefully, be taken into account by support teams in charge of managing customers' infrastructures. Thus, to incorporate it to the dynamics of IT support activities, service delivery teams of IT providers must develop abilities to understand and mechanisms to retain and use the knowledge of the core business of each customer. This paper addresses relevant aspects of service delivery affected by the peaks that impose variations on demands and levels of service expected by customers of IT outsourcing. Also, it proposes some insights to transform customer (business driven) needs into elements already existing inside IT support organizations and argue that this transformation may reduce substantially the overhead of translating customer business to support operations. In order to corroborate the argument and instantiate the discussion, incident data collected by an IT service delivery provider are presented and analyzed graphically in details. © 2014 IEEE.