The Application System Landscapes of IT Service Providers: A Multi Case Study

Abstract

Achieving efficiency gains on all levels of enterprise architecture by such means as standardization has been and is a goal of researchers and practitioners working on the provisioning of IT services. At the process level, provisioning IT services is defined in common practice frameworks like the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL describes a trend where vendors offer new application systems for IT service providers with an increasingly holistic approach. However, it remains unanswered what these systems are, what the as-is situation of application system landscapes of providers is (regarding their application system mix), and if different types of providers use different types of systems. To address these questions, a case study approach was adopted: External and internal IT service providers provisioning industrial or personal services were sampled as cases, spanning all types (provider categories) within the adopted IT service provider categorization framework. We found that IT service providers from the same category have a similar mix of application systems. The paper contributes to the knowledge base by informing those who need to make pre-appraisals about a provider's current application system landscape (e.g. within merger and acquisitions projects) as well as allowing practitioners to proactively construct their landscapes during market entry.