Business is faced with a dynamic environment. New IT developments often have an influence on corporate structures and on business processes. Many business processes cannot be run without IT. As the importance of IT is growing, the requirements imposed on IT service providers by IT service requesters are changing [40, p. 3]. In order to cope with these requirements, many methods and approaches are discussed and studied in science and practice. Thus, issues like service orientation of IT, IT service management, and industrialization of IT has been gaining in importance during recent years. Applying principles of industrialization has caused fundamental changes in many lines of business throughout the last decades. In the IT sector, the process of industrialization is still ongoing. Therefore, IT can learn and profit from the experiences of other sectors. At the same time, in the IT domain the so-called best practices – proven working methods – become established. They can help companies to control and manage the ever rising requirements regarding effectiveness and efficiency that are imposed on IT departments and external providers. In recent years, especially the ITIL framework which is based on best practices has been gaining in importance. This framework has been revised twice since the original publication and has been available as version 3 (ITIL® v3) for corporate use since May 2007 [38, p. 15].
The question arises if – in the reversed direction of the influence mentioned above – the application of best practice methods from the IT domain to other business sectors,
especially to the service sector, is possible and reasonable. If this were the case, these sectors could put methods from the IT sector into action and execute their own services more effectively and efficiently, just as the IT sector is profiting from the industrialization experiences of other sectors. In this paper, we study the feasibility of a generalized service delivery concept based on ITIL. The applicability of this concept is demonstrated using the example of after-sales services.
The sources underlying the development of ITIL are manifold. The authors found no evidence that similar approaches in manufacturing or other business sectors outside of IT have been incorporated into ITIL. Instead, the main contributions came from the IT domain. The focus of this paper is on the potential application of IT best practices
in other business areas. We are not investigating if ITIL or other IT best practices have directly or indirectly incorporated experiences from manufacturing etc