Towards Improvement of IT Service Adoption in Multi-Business Organizations

IT departments in Multi-Business Organizations (MBOs) face challenges when providing services to satisfy business needs. In many cases, the services provided by an IT department do not address all the requirements of the relevant business units and hence are only partially adopted by a subset of units. While existing research on enterprise architecture and service provision focuses on business-IT alignment and optimization of quality or efficiency, our objective is to maximize the number of stakeholders and business units fully adopting the services provided by the IT department. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual model which comprises organizational and IT service-related concepts. With this underlying model, we propose a method for improving the cooperation among IT departments and business units in order to increase the adoption of the most appropriate services taking into account the variation in business unit characteristics and performance indicators. We describe how the analysis and presentation of the information gathered from the stakeholders can support decision makers and advance the adoption goals of the IT department and the whole MBO. We present the results of a case study whose aim is to determine the feasibility of the approach. The case study deals with a business need for scheduling meetings between customers and bankers in a large bank.