Variant configuration for IT-services and its impact on the service request fulfillment process

REQUIRED) IT organizations are currently facing a trade-off between standardization and customer individuality. Standardization is one means to realize scale economies, is prerequisite to automate the delivery of IT-services and hence a possibility to cut costs. Best-practice frameworks like ITIL also drive the standardization efforts by defining IT-service catalogues and standard processes. Upcoming or rather ongoing trends like on-demand computing require standardization to assure efficient allocation of resources. But on the other hand customers of IT-services are confronted with increasing competition in their business that provokes individuality of their processes. Consequently IT-services must also be adjustable or customizable to meet the customers’ needs. The resulting variety must be handled efficiently by the IT organization to stay or become competitive. One means to cope with variety in the service request fulfillment process is variant configuration. In our contribution we discuss how variant configuration mechanisms can be applied on IT-services and what impact variant configuration has for the service request fulfillment process.