IT Services

Maintaining and managing information technology (IT) infrastructure is increasingly taking a services orientation where external providers offer a set of services at pre-specified quality levels to support the various IT functions within an organization. This renewed focus on IT from a services perspective and associated implications provides the impetus to investigate issues regarding pricing, resource allocation, and performance evaluation systems. Demand patterns impact the resource allocation and subsequent pricing decisions of the provider ; whereas service interaction results in correlated performance measures, making performance evaluation difficult. Our research has investigated dynamic price-penalty scheme as an alternative to the traditional fixed-price models as a response to demand variance. Additionally, we are investigating the nature of the relationship between different incentive designs and performance measures, and their impact on a provider’s effort allocation and customer’s use of performance measures. The research program is aimed to provide insights toward designing effective IT service provisioning models by exploring the interrelationships among price, performance metrics, and incentives. From a process perspective, we have analyzed large help desk datasets to discover Knowledge models that provide insights on knowledge usage patterns.

Key Personnel

Sagnika Sen
Raghu Santanam
Ajay Vinze
Theresa Edgington

Publications:

Sen, S., T.S. Raghu, and Vinze, A., "Interdependencies in IT Infrastructure Services: Analyzing Service Processes for Optimal Incentive Design," (Technical Report), 2006.

Edgington, T., T. S. Raghu, Vinze, A., "A Knowledge Ontology Focus on Failure Analysis in an IT Services Business Process," (Technical Report), 2006.

Sen, S., T.S. Raghu, and Vinze, A., “Evaluating Alternative Pricing Models for Service-Oriented E-Businesses,” Proceedings of the Workshop on E-Business (WEB), Las Vegas, 2005.

Sen, S., T.S. Raghu, and Vinze, A., “A Dynamic Approach to Managing Enterprise IT Infrastructure Services,” Proceedings of the Workshop on E-Business (WEB), Washington, D. C, 2004.

Edgington, T., Raghu T. S., Vinze, A., “Knowledge Ontology: A Method for Empirical Identification of ‘As-Is’ Contextual Knowledge,” Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2005.

Edgington, T., Raghu, T. S. and Vinze, A., 2003. “Leveraging Knowledge Creation Through Failure Analysis: An Ontological Orientation,” Proceedings AMCIS.