On Pricing Complex IT Service Solutions

Akkiraju, Rama; Smith, Mark M.; Greenia, Daniel; Jiang, Shun; Nakamura, Taiga; Mukherjee, Debdoot; Pusapaty, Shyam

doi:10.1109/srii.2014.19

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…In addition to the bottom line, soft factors are considered by practitioners to be key to a successful cooperation. One new aspect of this topic, which has evolved and been studied intensively for years, is trust and control in an outsourcing relationship (Dongus et al , 2014; Greenia et al , 2014; Akkiraju et al , 2014). This issue is of significant concern to practitioners.…”

Section: Research Methods and Applicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quo vadis outsourcing? A view from practice

Gewald

Schäfer

2017

JGOSS

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Purpose The purpose of this study is to derive a prioritized list of the present and future topics that sourcing managers in large companies are mostly concerned with using a rigorous methodological approach. Design/methodology/approach The Delphi method was chosen to derive the list. An initial list of topics was compiled based on a literature review combined with the results of an expert panel. This input was prioritized and extended by sourcing managers over three iterations. Findings The findings indicate that outsourcing remains a hot topic, even after almost 25 years of academic research. The authors identified four clusters where outsourcing scholars who are interested to provide insights and guidance for practitioners should focus their attention: managerial decisions (selection of the right partner and ability of the company to outsource parts of their business), managing the service provider (governance issues and relationship management and alignment), managerial responsibilities (integrated risk management and adherence to regulation and compliance) and increased flexibility (cloud computing and multi-vendor arrangements). Research limitations/implications The findings are only directly transferrable to large companies using experienced sourcing managers in Germany. Originality/value The findings may serve as input in formulating a research agenda which helps to align scholars’ focus and practitioners’ problems.

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Section: Research Methods and Applicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quo vadis outsourcing? A view from practice

Gewald

Schäfer

2017

JGOSS

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“…Large outsourcing contracts typically involve composite services such as data center consolidation and management, migration of IT services to the cloud, help desk services management, and IT applications management which consist of several thousands of technical hardware, software, services, and labor components [2]. It then comes at no surprise that the bidding process consists of a series of complex activities including the creation of solutions for the client's request for proposals, proposal design, costing and pricing, and deal closure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Business Insights into Predictive Analytics for the Outcome of IT Service Contracts

Megahed

Ren

Firth

2015

2015 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing

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The chances of winning highly valued Information Technology (IT) service contracts are influenced by various factors. Identifying key factors driving the competition and the early prediction of the outcome (either winning or losing such sales opportunities) can have significant business benefits. Given the complexity of IT services, range of potential attributes, and scarcity of comparable data sets, the straightforward approach of developing predictive analytical models that works well in other industries, such as consumer products, tends to achieve lower accuracy in this context. In this paper, we develop an approach that uses business insights and domain knowledge in the classification of several of the attributes influencing the outcome. We show how using this approach in a naïve Bayes predictive analytics framework can vastly improve the prediction accuracy. Further, we discuss two applications of our model; early prioritization of newly validated sales opportunities and optimization of sales force allocation and planning.

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