Designing pilot for operational innovation in IT service delivery

Abstract

Dramatic changes are taking place in the world of IT services: in who is competing with whom, in what determines competitive success, in the technologies of product and production, and in the very ways of business' approach to innovation. Operational Innovation has become a vital necessity for IT Service Providers. It affects what their employees do every day and how they do that. Because it impacts the very core of service delivery, there is an obvious risk associated with it. The benefits of operational changes are not always easy to assess and it often creates confusion. The confusion is real and the stakes for businesses are high. We argue that direct experimentation, or piloting, is both necessary and possible for introduction of operational innovations into Service Delivery. The novelty of this work is twofold: first, we propose to use design of experiments framework for IT service delivery, addressing the essential differences between delivery of IT services and manufacturing; second, we propose robust sequential design of experiments for service processes as part of the framework and demonstrate it on a sample process.