Discovering Organizational Elements for IT Service Brokering from a

Literature Review

Linda Rodriguez and Oscar Avila

Department of Systems and Computing Engineering, School of Engineering, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia

Keywords:

Cloud Sourcing, Outsourcing, Brokering, Inter-mediator, Integrator.

Abstract:

New technological trends and models are allowing organizations to easily access to specialized external IT

services. As a consequence, IT areas are developing fewer and fewer IT services and relying more on external

providers to achieve their customers’ objectives. In this new context, the IT function should move from its

traditional role of service builder and operator to a new role of service integrator and broker. However, IT

areas are not aware of the organizational elements that need to be implemented to adopt this new role. In

order to compensate this lack, this work presents a review of the existing literature intended to identify IT

capabilities, roles, skills and strategies that can help IT organizations to act as a service broker. Our ﬁndings

aim at establishing the basis for a complete approach.

1 INTRODUCTION

New technological trends and models, such a cloud

computing, crowdsourcing, offshoring, among others,

and the increasing emergence of new IT suppliers and

services in the last few years has produced a growing

offer of services in the IT market. In this context, or-

ganizations can ﬁnd easy and rapid responses to their

needs by contracting and accessing to external ser-

vices without making requests, seeking approvals or

consulting the IT department (Zimmermann and Ren-

trop, 2014). According to (Stratecast, 2016), 83% of

employees in business areas of U.S. companies use

IT services and applications that are not authorized

by the IT department to carry out their daily work. If

this is the case this could mean that the business ar-

eas would be meeting a part of their needs and taking

advantage of the beneﬁts offered by external services

without the intervention of the IT department. How-

ever, this scenario could bring also security threats,

since users would be overlooking the information se-

curity policies and requirements of their organizations

(Zimmermann and Rentrop, 2014). Considering the

potential beneﬁts and risks associated to such scenario

it could be said that the IT department should, on the

one hand, facilitate the use of external IT services in

order to allow business areas to reap the beneﬁts they

offer, and, on the other hand, govern the procurement

and access to such services in order to reduce poten-

tial risks.

To succeed in, IT functions need to assume a new

management role allowing them to intermediate be-

tween the external suppliers and the business cus-

tomer in order to ease and control the supply of IT

services. This role has been deﬁned in the the follow-

ing research works (Rackspace, 2014a), (Erbes et al.,

2012), (Rackspace, 2014b) as IT service broker. Ac-

cording to these works, in this role IT exercises the

role of intermediary between external suppliers and

internal customers in the provision of technology ser-

vices, with the aim of focusing its own efforts on the

delivery of solutions that leverage the business strat-

egy. The IT department acts as a strategic partner for

the business and as the sole responsible for the provi-

sion of IT services to the business. But the reality is

that in most of cases IT departments do not know how

to take on this new role because there is a lack of con-

ceptual tools and knowledge about the organizational

elements that need to be changed in the IT function

in order to offer a unique and ﬂexible catalog of ser-

vices that meets business needs from the aggregation

and integration of the services contracted to external

suppliers.

Considering the need above mentioned, this re-

search work presents a review of the literature to iden-

tify and analyze the contributions in the IT service

brokering area. The main objective of this review is

to provide a general and up-to-date overview of exist-

ing work in order to identify and describe capabilities,

roles, skills and strategies that that can help IT orga-

Rodriguez, L. and Avila, O.

Discovering Organizational Elements for IT Service Brokering from a Literature Review.

DOI: 10.5220/0006913201970204

In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE 2018) - Volume 1: DCNET, ICE-B, OPTICS, SIGMAP and WINSYS, pages 197-204

ISBN: 978-989-758-319-3

197

Table 1: Categories, criteria and research questions.

Category Criterion Research Question

Context

Domain What is the domain of the research work?

Objective What is the objective of the research work?

Role of IT

personnel and

function

IT Function

What is the role of the IT function in the Service Broker role?

What are the capabilities required by the IT function in this role?

IT Personnel

What are the roles required by IT experts in the Service Broker role?

What are the skills required by IT experts in the Service Broker role?

Business strategy Alignment What is the IT strategy in the Service Broker role?

nizations to act as a service broker. Our ﬁndings aim

at establishing the basis for a complete approach or

management model.

To succeed in, ﬁrstly, we present in Section 2 a

review of the state of the art by following a system-

atic method that help us to understand the main orga-

nizational elements to be included the IT department

when working as a Service Broker. Finally, Section 3

concludes the paper.

2 STATE OF THE ART

The following steps were used to conduct the review

process: (i) Planning: This stage focuses on plan-

ning the search to identify the most relevant contribu-

tions. Thus we deﬁne in this step the research objec-

tive and an evaluation framework including research

categories/criteria and questions in order to conduct

the search as well as validate and select the most per-

tinent works. (ii) Realization: It consists in making an

exhaustive search for works deﬁning the search crite-

ria, and assessing the found approaches in order to

select those that answer the research questions. (iii)

Analysis: This stage is related to the extraction of the

relevant information of each selected approach and to

synthesized it in order to answer the research ques-

tions of the framework.

2.1 Planning

The objective of this research work is to identify and

analyze the characteristics of the IT Service Broker

role to help IT departments in adopting the role. To

perform this analysis, we propose a framework that

is structured in term of: categories, criteria and re-

search questions. The categories are divided into: (i)

Context: to examine the domain and purpose of each

research work; (ii) IT function and personnel: aspects

related to the new role and capabilities of the IT area

as well as the skills of its experts; (iii) Alignment of IT

with the business: type of relationship to the business

strategy under this new role. The elements previously

described are shown in Table 1.

2.2 Realization

With the purpose of ﬁnding potential research works

answering the research questions previously an-

nounced, the Scopus database was used by introduc-

ing the following criteria: (i) Search area: Computer

Science, Business, Management and Accounting and

Engineering. (ii) Document type: book, book chap-

ter, article, conference paper and journal paper. (iii)

Search ﬁeld type: Abstract, title and keywords. (iv)

Language: English.

Thus, the query introduced in the database is:

TITLE-ABS-KEY ( ( “brokering” OR “broker” OR

“mediator” OR “inter-agency” OR “interagency”

OR “inter agency” OR “builder” OR “integra-

tor” OR “integration” OR “composition” OR “com-

poser” OR “decomposition” OR “decomposer” OR

“break down” OR “breakdown” OR “unbundled”

OR “unbundling” OR “brokerage” ) AND ( “IT ser-

vice” OR “ITC service” OR “cloud service” OR

“saas” OR “paas” OR “iaas” OR “cloud comput-

ing” OR “cloud management” OR “outsourcing” OR

“Information technolgy” OR “enterprise mashup” )

AND ( “IT department” OR “CIO” OR “IT func-

tion” OR “IT area” OR “IT unit” OR “IT functional

unit” OR “IT business unit” OR “IT functional area”

OR “enterprise IT” OR “emerging trends” OR “aca-

demic research” ) )

With these criteria, the Scopus search engine re-

turned 98 candidate articles. To reduce the number

of articles included in the analysis, ﬁrstly, a review of

the articles titles was carried out. This ﬁlter reduced

the number to 35. Secondly, a reading of articles ab-

stracts was undertaken to ﬁlter those works that do

not present evidence of answering any of the analy-

sis questions. This ﬁlter limited the number of arti-

cles to 12. Thirdly, a complete reading of the articles

was performed to select the ﬁnal works set made up

of 7 articles which were identied and included in the

analysis. Therefore, in order to identify more relevant

works, it was decided to carry out a Google search

to ﬁnd articles, books or white papers concerning the

research objective. As a result, 5 white papers from

technology companies that talk about the role were

obtained.

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198

In order to include to our analysis the contribu-

tions mode by the existing standards, best practices

and reference frameworks in the area of IT service

management, we include the following works to our

review: IT4IT (Information Technology for Informa-

tion Technology) (TheOpenGroup, 2017), ITIL (In-

formation Technology Infrastructure Library) (AXE-

LOS, 2017), FitSM (Fitsm, 2017) and COBIT (Con-

trol Objectives for Information Systems and related

Technology) (ISACA, 2012).

2.3 Analysis

A synthesis of the selected works, with reference to

the research questions is presented below (see Table

2).

2.3.1 What is the Domain of the Research

Work?

Two domains are identiﬁed, academy and industry. In

the academy domain, seven works were found: six

works in the Computer Science area and one work in

the Business, Management and Accounting area. The

categorization of these areas was taken from Scopus.

Concerning the industry domain, documents identi-

ﬁed do not make reference to a speciﬁc industrial sec-

tor. Last, the document (Erbes et al., 2012) was found

through Scopus, however, it also presents elements of

the industry because it was issued by the laboratory

of the Hewlett Packard (HP) company. For this rea-

son it was categorized in both the academy and in the

industry.

2.3.2 What is the Objective of the Research

Work?

When analyzing the 16 works, two common objec-

tives are identiﬁed. The ﬁrst objective is to provide

contributions to help the IT department to adopt the

IT Service Broker role. Consequently, these docu-

ments propose recommendations(Rackspace, 2014a),

methodologies (Erbes et al., 2012) (HewlettPackard,

2013), best practices for the IT personnel (Rackspace,

2014b), reasons to switch to Service Broker role

(Stratecast, 2016), challenges facing the IT func-

tion to adopt cloud computing (Willcocks et al.,

2012), standard reference architecture (TheOpen-

Group, 2017), best practices for IT service manage-

ment (AXELOS, 2017) (Fitsm, 2017) and role and

business frameworks for the governance and manage-

ment of IT (ISACA, 2012). The second objective is

to argue the need for IT departments of change from

the traditional role of constructor and operator of IT

services to the role of broker of IT services (Gefen

et al., 2011), (Ragowsky et al., 2014), (Rohmeyer and

Ben-Zvi, 2012), (Wadhwa et al., 2013).

2.3.3 What is the Role of the IT Function in the

Service Broker Role?

The identiﬁed roles are described below:

(i) IT service broker. The IT department ex-

ercises the role of intermediary between exter-

nal suppliers and customers (Erbes et al., 2012)

(Willcocks et al., 2012) (Hoyer and Stanoevska-

Slabeva, 2009), (Rackspace, 2014a) (Rackspace,

2014b) (HewlettPackard, 2013) (Stratecast, 2016),

(Devoteam, 2014) (TheOpenGroup, 2017). This role

is responsible for all aspects related to technology in

the organization. Thus, customers should only con-

tact the IT department to obtain technological ser-

vices (this helps reduce shadow IT). In addition, the

IT department will be responsible for managing IT

providers and services. This is the main role of the IT

department in the IT Service Broker role, the follow-

ing roles, from (ii) to (iii) were identiﬁed as sub-roles.

(ii) IT service integrator. In addition to the role

of IT service broker, it is inferred from the articles

(Erbes et al., 2012), (Gefen et al., 2011), (Ragowsky

et al., 2014), (Hoyer and Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009),

(Rackspace, 2014a) and (HewlettPackard, 2013) a

sub-role that need to be assumed by the IT depart-

ment: the service integrator. According to (Wadhwa

et al., 2013) to support a business process, could be

necessary to combine services from different suppli-

ers. As a result, the IT area should be able to integrate

the different services to offer an unique consumer ex-

perience.

(iii) IT service administrator. It is understood as

the role in charge of managing the entire life cycle of

the service contracting process, from the acquisition

to the termination of the service contract, so that these

services are aligned with the business strategy (Erbes

et al., 2012) (Hoyer and Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009)

(Rackspace, 2014a) (Rackspace, 2014b).

(iv) Aggregator, Governator and Customizer. Ac-

cording to (Wadhwa et al., 2013), these three roles

are speciﬁc for Cloud Service Brokers (CSB): (i) Ag-

gregator: is an intermediate company that contract

multiple services in the cloud from different suppli-

ers and offers them to different customers through a

uniﬁed catalog. The intermediary manages service

level agreements (SLA) for the customer. (ii) Gover-

nator: for specialized intermediaries in the cloud it is

a speciﬁc role that guarantee data protection and secu-

rity. The intermediary ensures that the cloud provider

manages the data according to regulations and secu-

rity policies previously established. (iii) Customizer:

this role consists in developing speciﬁc functionality

Discovering Organizational Elements for IT Service Brokering from a Literature Review

199

to previously existing cloud services to meet a speciﬁc

need of the customer.

2.3.4 What are the Capabilities Required by the

IT Function in the Service Broker Role?

To respond to this question, we understand a Busi-

ness Capability as the particular ability that a com-

pany possesses to achieve a speciﬁc purpose or result

(Blair and Marshall, 2016). For the IT function, the

following capabilities were inferred from the revision.

(see Table 2).

(i) Supplier management. This capability involves

searching, contracting, integrating, supervising and

managing a wide variety of external suppliers (Erbes

et al., 2012) (Rackspace, 2014a) (Rackspace, 2014b)

(AXELOS, 2017) (Fitsm, 2017) (ISACA, 2012). Be-

sides this capability includes to obtain good value for

money from suppliers and ensuring that all contracts

and agreements with them meet the needs of the busi-

ness (AXELOS, 2017).

(ii) Services catalog management. The process re-

sponsible for providing and maintaining the service

catalogue and for ensuring that it is available to those

who are authorized to access it (Erbes et al., 2012)

(Rackspace, 2014a) (Rackspace, 2014b) (TheOpen-

Group, 2017) (AXELOS, 2017) (TheOpenGroup,

2017).

(iii) Requirements management. It consists in

identifying customer needs, analyzing them before

the acquisition of the service, prioritizing them ac-

cording to the business strategy and, in conjunc-

tion with the catalog management capability ﬁnding

a service that meet such needs (Erbes et al., 2012)

(Rackspace, 2014a) (ISACA, 2012) (TheOpenGroup,

2017).

(iv) Service level management (SLM). It con-

sists in the identiﬁcation, speciﬁcation, design, pub-

lication, compliance and monitoring of service level

agreements (SLAs) (Gefen et al., 2011) (Wadhwa

et al., 2013) (Rackspace, 2014a) (Rackspace, 2014b)

(AXELOS, 2017) (Fitsm, 2017) (ISACA, 2012). In

addition to negotiating clear SLAs with suppliers,

through this capability the IT department ensures that

they are appropriate to the needs of customers and

continuously reports the service levels achieved.

(v) Offer management. It is in charge of publish-

ing the catalog entries and deﬁning with precision and

detail the services, including dependenciesand prices.

It is also responsible for grouping speciﬁc offers for a

speciﬁc group of customers. The purpose is to facili-

tate a service consumption experience that allows cus-

tomers to easily access services through self-service

(TheOpenGroup, 2017).

(vi) Requests fulﬁllment management. A request

contains the selection of offers made by the customer

from the service catalog. This capability is respon-

sible for managing those requests. It capability is

speciﬁcally responsible for: tracking the status of

the request, directing the request to the provider to

be attended, as well as recording consumption pat-

terns of the services. Managing customer requests is

for the purpose of maintaining customer satisfaction

(TheOpenGroup, 2017).

(vii) Knowledge management. This capability in-

cludes to collect, analyze, store and share knowl-

edge and information in order to help customer to

meet their needs. The objective is to reduce the

number of requests for information and increase self-

service.(TheOpenGroup, 2017).

(viii) Customer relationship management. It fo-

cuses on the relationship with customers, which in-

cludes to identify potential customers, assign a re-

sponsible to manage the relationship of each cus-

tomer, establish communication mechanisms with

customers and manage complaints from customers

(Fitsm, 2017) (AXELOS, 2017). It recommends the

relationship on mutual trust, using understandable

terms, common language and willingness to take re-

sponsibility (ISACA, 2012).

(ix) Services portfolio management. The pro-

cess responsible for managing the service portfolio.

Service portfolio management ensures that the ser-

vice provider has the right mix of services to meet

required business outcomes at an appropriate level

of investment. Service portfolio management con-

siders services in terms of the business value that

they provide (Erbes et al., 2012) (Rackspace, 2014a)

(Rackspace, 2014b) (TheOpenGroup, 2017) (AXE-

LOS, 2017) (TheOpenGroup, 2017).

2.3.5 What are the Essential Roles Required by

IT Experts in the Service Broker Role?

The following IT expert roles were identiﬁed as im-

portant in the IT Service Broker role.

(i) Supplier and partner manager: It is essential

to have IT experts who address simultaneously the

management of multiple suppliers because of the ac-

celerated growth in the number of suppliers in cur-

rent organization. Regarding their activities experts

should master the supplier management capability

above mentioned . This role is in charge of ensuring

that contracts with suppliers support the needs of the

business and all suppliers comply with their contrac-

tual commitments (Erbes et al., 2012) (Gefen et al.,

2011) (Willcocks et al., 2012) (Rackspace, 2014a)

(Rackspace, 2014b) (HewlettPackard, 2013) (Strate-

cast, 2016).

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Table 2: Answers of related works to research questions for Roles, Capabilities and Expert IT Roles.

IT Function

Roles

IT service broker

(Erbes et al., 2012), (Willcocks et al., 2012), (Hoyer and

Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009), (Rackspace, 2014a), (Rackspace, 2014b),

(HewlettPackard, 2013), (Stratecast, 2016), (Devoteam, 2014), (TheOpen-

Group, 2017)

IT service integrator

(Erbes et al., 2012), (Gefen et al., 2011), (Ragowsky et al., 2014), (Wadhwa

et al., 2013), (Hoyer and Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009), (Rackspace, 2014a),

(HewlettPackard, 2013)

IT service administrator

(Erbes et al., 2012), (Hoyer and Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009) (Rackspace,

2014a), (Rackspace, 2014b)

Aggregator, Governator, Cus-

tomizer

(Wadhwa et al., 2013)

Capabilities

Supplier management

(Erbes et al., 2012),(Gefen et al., 2011), (Willcocks et al., 2012),

(Rackspace, 2014a), (Rackspace, 2014b), (HewlettPackard, 2013), (Strate-

cast, 2016), (AXELOS, 2017), (Fitsm, 2017), (ISACA, 2012)

Services catalog management

(Erbes et al., 2012),(Rackspace, 2014a), (Rackspace, 2014b), (Stratecast,

2016), (TheOpenGroup, 2017), (AXELOS, 2017)

Requirements management

(Erbes et al., 2012), (Rackspace, 2014a), (TheOpenGroup, 2017), (ISACA,

2012)

Service level management

(SLM)

(Gefen et al., 2011), (Wadhwa et al., 2013), (Rackspace, 2014a),

(Rackspace, 2014b), (AXELOS, 2017), (Fitsm, 2017), (ISACA, 2012)

Offer management (TheOpenGroup, 2017)

Requests fulﬁllment manage-

ment

(TheOpenGroup, 2017), (AXELOS, 2017)

Knowledge management (TheOpenGroup, 2017), (AXELOS, 2017)

Customer relationship manage-

ment

(AXELOS, 2017), (Fitsm, 2017), (ISACA, 2012)

Services portfolio management

(Erbes et al., 2012),(Rackspace, 2014a), (Rackspace, 2014b), (Stratecast,

2016), (TheOpenGroup, 2017), (AXELOS, 2017)

IT Personnel

Expert IT roles

Supplier and partner manager

(Erbes et al., 2012), (Gefen et al., 2011), (Willcocks et al., 2012),

(Rackspace, 2014a), (Rackspace, 2014b), (HewlettPackard, 2013), (Strate-

cast, 2016), (AXELOS, 2017)

Service manager

(Erbes et al., 2012), (Rackspace, 2014a), (Rackspace, 2014b), (Stratecast,

2016), (AXELOS, 2017), (ISACA, 2012)

IT services integration specialist

(Ragowsky et al., 2014), (Hoyer and Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009),

(Rackspace, 2014a), (Rackspace, 2014b)

Enterprise architect (Rackspace, 2014b), (HewlettPackard, 2013)

Financial manager (Ragowsky et al., 2014), (HewlettPackard, 2013), (Stratecast, 2016)

Strategic advisor

(Gefen et al., 2011), (Ragowsky et al., 2014), (Rohmeyer and Ben-Zvi,

2012), (HewlettPackard, 2013)

Business relationship manager (AXELOS, 2017)

Business analyst (Erbes et al., 2012), (Rackspace, 2014a), (TheOpenGroup, 2017)

Service level manager (AXELOS, 2017), (Fitsm, 2017)

Catalog manager (AXELOS, 2017), (Fitsm, 2017)

Knowledge manager (AXELOS, 2017)

Discovering Organizational Elements for IT Service Brokering from a Literature Review

201

(ii) Service manager: The person in charge of

managing the life cycle of services managing the de-

velopment, implementation, evaluation and contin-

uous management of new and existing services for

the customer . In addition, this person make deci-

sions about which service should be developed inter-

nally or purchased from an external provider (Erbes

et al., 2012) (Rackspace, 2014a) (Rackspace, 2014b)

(Stratecast, 2016) (ISACA, 2012) (AXELOS, 2017).

(iii) IT services integration specialist: this consists

in supporting support a process of business through

the uniﬁcation of services from different suppliers

and offer the customer a unique service (Rackspace,

2014a) (Rackspace, 2014b) (Ragowsky et al., 2014)

(Hoyer and Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009). If services

are contracted from different providers, but integra-

tion is required to solve a business need. IT experts

should have software development skills from multi-

ple platforms (Hoyer and Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009)

(Rackspace, 2014b).

(iv) Enterprise architect: the IT department should

have an enterprise architect to assume a more strate-

gic role and have a holistic view of the company’s

needs (Rackspace, 2014b) (HewlettPackard, 2013). It

is also inferred that this role has deep knowledge in

business, negotiation skills, leadership and domain to

propose IT solutions.

(v) Financial manager: the IT Service Broker role

when hiring several suppliers to supply IT services

to the customers. It becomes indispensable to have

IT experts who know of contracts, licenses, ﬁnancial

projection of costs and clauses (Gefen et al., 2011)

(Ragowsky et al., 2014) (Rohmeyer and Ben-Zvi,

2012) (HewlettPackard, 2013).

(vi) Strategic Advisor: IT experts should be

trusted business partners. The strategic objectives of

the company can be leveraged through the generation

of IT solutions. Therefore, expert consultants or au-

ditors are required to advise the business from tech-

nology (Gefen et al., 2011) (Ragowsky et al., 2014)

(Rohmeyer and Ben-Zvi, 2012) (HewlettPackard,

2013).

(vii) Business relationship manager (BRM): the

person in charge of maintaining a positive relation-

ship with customers (AXELOS, 2017). BRM pro-

cess identiﬁes the needs of existing and potential cus-

tomers and ensures that appropriate services are de-

veloped to meet those needs.

(viii) Business analyst: It is inferred the need to

have a role that is responsible for the requirements

management, so it can identify ﬁrst-hand the needs

of customers (Erbes et al., 2012) (Rackspace, 2014a)

(TheOpenGroup, 2017).

(ix) Service level manager: the person responsi-

ble for negotiating and deﬁning service level agree-

ments (SLA) and ensuring that they are met (AXE-

LOS, 2017) (Fitsm, 2017).

(x) Catalog manager: the person responsible for

deﬁning and maintaining the catalog of services, as

well as ensuring that all the information contained

in the catalog is accurate and up-to-date (AXELOS,

2017). It also is named as a process manager, it is the

person in charge of ensuring that the service catalog

is aligned with the business strategy (Fitsm, 2017).

(xi) Knowledge manager: the person responsible

for ensuring that the IT organization is able to collect,

analyze, store and share knowledge and information

(AXELOS, 2017).

2.3.6 What are the Skills Required by IT

Experts in the Service Broker Role?

(Erbes et al., 2012) argue that in the IT service broker

role traditional skills such as network conﬁguration,

server administration or network support are replaced

by new skills, which are grouped by subject and de-

scribed as follows.

Supplier management: IT experts need skills to

deal with all the concerns related to suppliers such as:

searching, evaluating, integrating and orchestrating

multiple suppliers, and having the ability to maintain

good relations with suppliers and business partners

(Erbes et al., 2012) (Gefen et al., 2011) (Willcocks

et al., 2012) (Rackspace, 2014a) (Stratecast, 2016)

(AXELOS, 2017). In addition, they should manage

and supervise SLAs and contracts, as well as know

how to negotiate, obtain mutually beneﬁcial contracts

and have knowledge in market analysis.

Financial management: IT experts need skills to

manage costs, manipulate contracts, manage licenses

and monitor compliance with SLAs. There is an in-

creasing dependency of the IT function with the le-

gal department to contracting services with external

providers, however this department does not know

about service level agreements or how to measure the

effectiveness of the service. This is why CIOs pre-

fer to have IT experts who also dominate the ﬁnan-

cial, legal and contractual aspects of supplier man-

agement (Gefen et al., 2011) (Willcocks et al., 2012)

(Ragowsky et al., 2014) (HewlettPackard, 2013)

(Stratecast, 2016).

Strategic and customer management: IT experts

need skills in strategic and critical thinking, analytical

skills, capability for decision making, communication

at the commercial and technical level, solving prob-

lems, creativity, strategic analysis (Erbes et al., 2012)

(Ragowsky et al., 2014) (Rohmeyer and Ben-Zvi,

2012) (Willcocks et al., 2012) (Rackspace, 2014b).

Soft skills: soft skills such as communication are es-

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202

sential because of the continuous relationship with

customers and suppliers. According to (Erbes et al.,

2012) these skills are essential for the IT department

to become a strategic partner for the business. Ser-

vice integration: IT experts need to have a broad view

of the company’s needs and business objectives when

designing and integrating solutions (Ragowsky et al.,

2014) (Rackspace, 2014a) (Hoyer and Stanoevska-

Slabeva, 2009). Therefore, they should have the abil-

ity to evaluate the consequences of integration deci-

sions and have knowledge of different platforms for

integration.

Service management: IT experts should have the

ability to generate clear SLAs with customers, abil-

ity to generate metrics of service performance and

continuous monitoring to take preventive measures

(Hoyer and Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009) (Rackspace,

2014b) (Stratecast, 2016) (AXELOS, 2017). In addi-

tion, the expert should have skills to manage multiple

and different services.

2.3.7 What is the IT Strategy in the Service

Broker Role?

The following three IT strategies were inferred:

(i) Be a strategic partner for the business. The IT

department could be a strategic partner for the busi-

ness using technology to leverage strategic initiatives.

IT department experts could focus on strategic issues

with the Service Broker role, as issues with incidents

or problems will be handled by service providers. The

strategic objectives are met when the business rec-

ognizes and allows technology to be involved in the

strategies of the company (Rohmeyer and Ben-Zvi,

2012) (Gefen et al., 2011) (Willcocks et al., 2012).

(ii) IT governance. The catalog of services should

always be aligned with the business strategy. The ser-

vices that will make up the service catalog based on

the deﬁnition of the business strategy (Erbes et al.,

2012) (Rackspace, 2014b) (HewlettPackard, 2013). It

establishes a holistic view of the catalog of IT ser-

vices based on strategic priorities such as: business

value, risk, costs, beneﬁts and resources (TheOpen-

Group, 2017) (TheOpenGroup, 2017). In addition,

the IT department is solely responsible for all IT

services (Erbes et al., 2012) (Rackspace, 2014b)

(HewlettPackard, 2013).

(iii) Identify what service is built and what ser-

vice is contracted. One of the challenges facing the IT

department is deciding which IT services to hire and

which ones to develop internally (Erbes et al., 2012)

(Ragowsky et al., 2014). Among the services that are

hired, one of the decisions that should also be deﬁned

is which services are managed in the public cloud and

which in the private cloud.

2.4 Discussion

From the literature review, we identiﬁed a set of com-

mon organizational element for the IT Service Broker

role which are described in this section. These ele-

ments should be taken into account by the IT depart-

ment when migrating towards this new role.

According to the results of the analysis, the IT de-

partment should work with nine essential capabilities,

each of which is associated to an IT expert role with

respective skills.

Although relationships between the elements were

not found in the reviewed works, one of them could

be interpreted as follows: the customer raises needs

or requirements, that are prioritized by the require-

ments management capability according to the strate-

gic business plan. Thus, portfolio management de-

ﬁnes a service portfolio to meet business requirements

that is also aligned with the strategic business plan.

To deﬁne the services portfolio, it is necessary to con-

tact external suppliers that offer specialized services,

the suppliers management capability is in charge of

such task. In addition, form the portfolio, a catalog

is published by the offer capability in a portal that is

accessed by the customer. The customers in the portal

can consult all the services that are ready to consume,

in this way they can also consult all the detailed infor-

mation of the service. When a customer is interested

in a service published on the portal, this makes a re-

quest, which it is managed by the requests fulﬁllment,

through a contract with the provider. This contract

contains service-level agreements that are managed

by the service level management capability agree-

ments. Transversely to all the aforementioned IT ser-

vices management, it is the knowledge management

capability that takes knowledge generated by suppli-

ers and the IT department to make it available to cus-

tomers.

3 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

This article presents a literature review that identi-

ﬁes and analyzes the research works in the IT Ser-

vice Brokering domain. From this analysis, this pa-

per gathers the main organizational elements, such as

capabilities, roles, and skills, that can help IT orga-

nizations to work as a broker. Regarding roles of IT

experts, we identiﬁed a reduction in technical and tra-

ditional roles, such as infrastructure, servers and net-

works administrators, and an increase in new organi-

zational roles in the following areas in management,

consultancy, and strategy. Regarding skills, Concern-

Discovering Organizational Elements for IT Service Brokering from a Literature Review

203

ing capabilities, they follow the same way that skills

in the sens that IT departments are moving from fo-

cusing on technical capabilities to organizational ca-

pabilities. For example, today IT departments require

procurement capabilities, similar to the ones of pur-

chasing department, allowing them to supply the or-

ganization with technological goods and services.

Concerning future work, on the one hand, one of

the main ﬁndings of this research is the lack of aca-

demic research works and best practices in the IT Ser-

vice Brokering domain, although of the importance

that this phenomenon. This lack of works has had

repercussion in the ability of companies to migrate

to this role. For example, (Rackspace, 2014b) shows

that most IT executives see the IT Service Broker role

as a priority but only 25 percent have made a progress

in its adoption. In addition, (Rackspace, 2014b) con-

siders that this transition has been slow, in part, due

to the lack of best practices and frameworks. Fur-

thermore, according to (Wadhwa et al., 2014), there

is a clear gap in academic research in the area of

CSBs, even though Gartner projects a 100 billion dol-

lar growth in revenue for CSB in the next year. There-

fore, we consider that there is a need for academics to

get involved in studies regarding transformation and

change in the organization, as in (Avila and Garces,

2017), to support the transition to this role. On the

other hand, when we analyze the results correspond-

ing to the characteristics in the IT function, we con-

sider that they can be complemented and improved in

several ways in future investigations. Regarding the

adoption of the role, one of the main conclusions is

that the reviewed works are too focused on presenting

the urgency of a change in the IT function. However,

these works fail in proposing a set of good practices or

formal frameworks to carry out such change. In addi-

tion, in the literature review carried out no case stud-

ies or analysis of speciﬁc organizations were found.

We consider that it is important to research about real

application cases in order to abstract lessons learned

of the transition to service broker.

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