Adapting Modern Service Organizations Through Service Management Capabilities : Essays on Information Technology and Enterprise Service Management

The modern economy has undergone profound changes driven by the rise of service-oriented businesses, the transformative power of information technology (IT), and the increasing dynamism of global markets. Within this context, this cumulative dissertation explores service management as a dynamic, IT-enabled capability critical for modern service organizations. It focuses on IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) as pivotal enablers of organizational adaptability, efficiency, and competitiveness. ITSM, a management approach built upon reference frameworks, optimizes IT services through structured workflows and resource alignment. ESM extends these principles across business functions towards non-IT services, creating enterprise-wide efficiencies.
This research is motivated by two theoretical and one practical challenge in the service management field: the missing organizational context of ITSM maturity, the lack of theoretical grounding of ESM and the practical discrepancy in organizations between the digitalization urge for business workflows and the insufficient comprehension of ESM. This research bridges practical challenges with theoretical propositions by embedding service management concepts within theoretical frameworks of service-dominant logic, service systems, and dynamic capabilities.
This dissertation addresses three key research objectives: identifying contingency factors influencing ITSM capability, conceptualizing ESM as a hierarchical, resource-based construct, and developing a validated ESM capability instrument. In four essays, this dissertation delivers new insights, including a context-sensitive perspective on the maturity of service management capability, a unifying, holistic ESM definition, and an empirically grounded, measurable ESM capability model based on organizational, architectural, technological, shared information, and people resources (OATIP) dimensions.
The findings advance the theoretical clarity of both service management concepts and provide actionable guidance for organizations to effectively implement or mature ITSM and ESM frameworks. This introductory essay to the cumulative dissertation establishes the integrated research framework grounded in Information Systems theories, outlines the research objectives and questions, presents the applied methodology, and summarizes the core contributions.