Abstract
Nowadays, IT operations devolve many tasks in IT services to internal customers (i.e., IT self-service). The rationale for this service task devolvement is often to reduce the IT personnel’s workload. However, prior research has shown that IT operations often fail to achieve this goal. Existing methods for modeling and analyzing services fall short of supporting service providers in identifying and specifying service tasks suitable to be devolved to (internal) customers. This paper presents, therefore, the first method for devolving service tasks in IT services (DESERV IT). DESERV IT is a compound of four method components encompassing a joint meta-model, a visual notation for modeling IT services, and procedural recommendations. The DESERV IT meta-model extends the meta-model of service blueprinting by means of concepts required to analyze service task devolvement. DESERV IT is evaluated in four evaluation episodes. The results of the evaluation episodes show that DESERV IT is perceived as effective, useful, complete, and generalizable by experts in the IT service management and enterprise architecture discipline. This paper contributes to enterprise modeling by demonstrating the feasibility of DESERV IT in an example case and describing DESERV IT’s evolution during the evaluation episodes. DESERV IT supports practitioners (e.g., request fulfillment managers) in modeling and analyzing IT services.
Highlights
Within enterprises, IT services are performed by IT operations (Marrone and Kolbe 2011; Steinberg et al 2013)
In the third evaluation episode, we interviewed a focus group consisting of five experts in the field of IT service management (ITSM) about
The problem explication and related research (Kumar and Telang 2012; Ellway 2016) reveal that IT operations often devolve service tasks to internal customers of IT services without analyzing, at the design stage, whether this service task devolvement causes a lack of control and, failures that must be corrected by the IT personnel at the execution stage
Summary
IT services are performed by IT operations (Marrone and Kolbe 2011; Steinberg et al 2013). With the ongoing integration of software development and IT operations (DevOps) (Roche 2013), more and more service tasks are devolved by IT operations to software engineers. The rationale for IT self-services is not the reduction of operational costs, because such a cost reduction would only transfer costs from IT operations to other organizational functions of the same enterprise (Campbell et al 2010). F. Baer et al.: DESERV IT: A Method for Devolving Service Tasks in IT Services, Bus Inf Syst Eng 63(4):419439 (2021)
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