Managing business relationships in IT outsourcing

Enterprises rely on IT services and their efficient management. Enterprises have a choice to produce their IT services in-house or source them from external service providers. In the latter case, business relationships must be managed with service providers, ranging from managing contracts, contacts, observing the delivery of service, receiving and paying bills, conducting audits, dealing with incidents, etc. With an increasing number of contracted services in IT, the management of business relationships with service providers becomes a complex task. This paper describes a business interaction service which helps managing the business relationships with external IT service providers. This service can be operated in-house or can be provided as an external service itself. A prototype of the business interaction service has been built and demonstrated in prior work. This paper describes its adaptation for managing business relationships in IT outsourcing based on the SCOR framework.