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

IT organizations are currently facing a trade-off between standardization and customer individuality. Standardization is onemeans 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 standardprocesses. Upcoming or rather ongoing trends like on-demand computing require standardization to assure efficientallocation of resources. But on the other hand customers of IT-services are confronted with increasing competition in theirbusiness that provokes individuality of their processes. Consequently IT-services must also be adjustable or customizable tomeet the customers’ needs. The resulting variety must be handled efficiently by the IT organization to stay or becomecompetitive. One means to cope with variety in the service request fulfillment process is variant configuration. In ourcontribution we discuss how variant configuration mechanisms can be applied on IT-services and what impact variantconfiguration has for the service request fulfillment process.