Mass Customizing IT Service Agreements: Towards Individualized On-Demand Services

IT service providers shall achieve both cost reduction in their IT operations and customer individuality in service agreements. This article suggests adapting the well known principle of mass customization to balance individuality and standardization in service agreements. Dependent on the commitment modularity type, its employment may not only save time and resources at the point of customer involvement but also allow the pre-engineering of repeatable processes of provisioning and IT operations. We develop a conceptual model for positioning and classifying IT service providers as mass customizers of service agreements. This categorization is based on commitment modularity types and points of customer involvement in the IT service life cycle. We apply this typology to selected cases of service agreements at different IT service providers to explain four generic archetypes. We then introduce how to implement a specific archetype by modularizing self-contained commitments and productizing options and changes of a service agreement. That latter concept has been developed in close cooperation with four IT service providers and is currently piloted to redesign real life contractual relationships with a customer.