Towards a Service Brokering Model for IT Departments

Linda Rodriguez and Oscar Avila

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

Keywords: IT Unit, IT Service, Outsourcing, Intermediator, Integrator, Aggregator.

Abstract: The accelerated increase of new IT suppliers and services is allowing organizations to easily access to

specialized outsourced services. Consequently, IT departments are increasingly developing fewer IT services

and relying more on external providers to satisfy the needs of their customers. This new context requires a

change in the IT function, which should move from its traditional role of service builder and operator to a

new role of service integrator and broker. However, IT managers do not know in most of the cases which are

the capabilities, skills and resources required in the IT area to implement this new role. To cope with this lack,

we propose a management model built in two steps: (i) a review of the literature that help us to identify and

analyze the current contributions in the IT service brokering area, and (ii) to validate the findings made in the

literature review through a focus group with IT professionals and managers. The presented model aims at

establishing the basis for a complete approach to help IT organizations to adopt the IT service broker role.

1 INTRODUCTION

The development of the digital market and the

accelerated increase of Information Technology (IT)

suppliers in the last few years has produced a growing

offer of increasingly specialized and robust IT

services. In this context, business areas of the

organizations are self-supplying IT services because

they can find easy access and rapid response to their

needs in the external market (Zimmermann and

Rentrop, 2014). In many cases, they contract and

access to external services without making requests,

seeking approvals or consulting the IT department

(Zimmermann and Rentrop, 2014). Gartner have

found that around 30% of IT spending in large

enterprises correspond to IT services and applications

that have not been authorized by the IT department.

In addition nearly 24% of corporate employee admit

they have purchased and/or deployed a cloud

application without the knowledge of their IT

departments (Stratecast, 2016). If this is the case this

could mean that the business areas 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. However, this

scenario could bring security threats since users

would be overlooking the information security

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 area 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 potential risks.

To succeed in, IT departments need to assume a

new management model allowing them to

intermediate between the external suppliers and the

business customer in order to ease and control the

supply of IT services. This model has been defined by

Erbes et al. (2012) and Rackspace (2014a) as IT

service brokering. According to these works, in this

model IT exercises the role of intermediary between

external suppliers and internal customers in the

provision of IT services, with the aim of focusing its

own efforts on the delivery of solutions that leverage

the business strategy. In this new role, the IT

department acts as a strategic partner and as the sole

responsible for the provision 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

model because there is a lack of knowledge about the

organizational capabilities, roles, skills and resources

that need to be changed or implemented in the IT

function in order to offer a unique and flexible catalog

of services that meets business needs from the

aggregation and integration of external services.

182

Rodriguez, L. and Avila, O.

Towards a Service Brokering Model for IT Departments.

DOI: 10.5220/0006902901820189

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 182-189

ISBN: 978-989-758-319-3

Considering the need above mentioned, this

research work contributes a conceptual model that

aims at establishing the basis for a complete approach

to help IT organizations to make the transition to this

management model. This conceptual model was built

by undertaken two steps: (i) a review of the existing

literature in the IT service brokering area in order to

identify and describe the capabilities, roles, skills and

resources that the IT function needs when working as

a service broker; (ii) a validation of the findings made

in the literature review through a focus group activity

in which IT professionals and managers working in

the IT areas of different industrial sectors companies

express their opinions and reactions.

This paper presents our work as follows: Section

2 presents the literature review by following a

systematic method that help us to identify the main

organizational elements of the IT Service Brokering

model. Section 3 presents the findings of the focus

group activity and introduces the resulting manage-

ment model. Finally, Section 4 concludes the paper.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

The following steps were used to conduct the review

process: (i) Planning: This stage focuses on planning

the search to identify the most relevant contributions.

We define thus in this step the review objective and

questions in order to conduct the search as well as

select and validate the most pertinent works. (ii)

Realization: It consists in making an exhaustive

search for works defining the search criteria 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 review questions.

2.1 Planning

The objective of this review is to identify and analyze

the main organizational elements of the IT Service

Brokering model stated in the literature. To perform

this analysis, we propose the following review

questions:

• What are the capabilities required by the IT

area in the Service Brokering model?

• What are the roles required by IT experts in

the Service Brokering model?

• What are the skills needed by IT experts in

the Service Brokering model?

• What are the resources required by IT

experts in the Service Brokering model?

2.2 Realization

With the purpose of finding potential research works

answering the research questions previously

announced, the Scopus database was used by

introducing the following criteria:

• Search area: Computer Science, Business,

Management and Accounting and

Engineering.

• Document type: book, book chapter, article,

conference paper and journal paper.

• Search field type: Abstract, title and

keywords.

• Language: English.

The query introduced in the database was:

TITLE-ABS-KEY (("brokering" OR "broker"

OR "mediator" OR "inter-agency" OR "interagency"

OR "inter agency" OR "builder" OR "integrator" OR

"integration" OR "composition" OR "composer" OR

"decomposition" OR "decomposer" OR "break

down" OR "breakdown" OR "unbundled" OR

"unbundling" OR "brokerage") AND ("IT service"

OR "ITC service" OR "cloud service" OR "saas" OR

"paas" OR "iaas" OR "cloud computing" OR "cloud

management" OR "outsourcing" OR "Information

technolgy" OR "enterprise mashup") AND ("IT

department" OR "CIO" OR "IT function" 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 "academic

research"))

With these criteria, the Scopus search engine

returned 98 candidate articles. To evaluate the

pertinence of these works, firstly, a review of the

articles titles was carried out. This filter reduced the

number to 35. Secondly, a reading of articles abstracts

was undertaken to filter those works that do not

present evidence of answering any of the analysis

questions. This filter limited the number of articles to

12. Lastly, a complete reading of the articles was

performed to select the final works set made up of 7

articles which were identiﬁed and included in the

analysis.

Considering the low number of academic works

that were found, we decided to carry out a Google

search to find articles, books or white papers

concerning our research objective. As a result, 5

white papers from technology companies that talk

about the model were found. In addition, to include to

our analysis the contributions made by practitioners

in existing standards, best practices and reference

frameworks in the area of IT service management, we

include the following works to our review: IT4IT

Towards a Service Brokering Model for IT Departments

183

(Information Technology for Information

Technology) (TheOpenGroup, 2017), ITIL

(Information Technology Infrastructure Library)

(AXELOS, 2017), FitSM (Fitsm, 2017) and COBIT

(Control Objectives for Information Systems and

related Technology) (ISACA, 2012).

2.3 Analysis

A synthesis of the literature review with reference to

the review questions is presented in Table 1. The

detail of the found values is described below.

Table 1: Summary of the literature review results.

Question Found values

What are the

capabilities

required by the IT

area in the Service

Brokering model?

⋅ Supplier management

⋅ Service catalog management

⋅ Requirement management

⋅ Request fulfillment

⋅ Service level management

⋅ Offer management

⋅ Demand management

⋅ Knowledge management

⋅ Customer relationship

management

⋅ Service portfolio management

What are the roles

required by IT

experts in the

Service Brokering

model?

⋅ Supplier and partner manager

⋅ Service manager

⋅ Service portfolio manager

⋅ IT integration specialist

⋅ Enterprise architect

⋅ Financial manager/controller

⋅ Strategic Advisor

⋅ Business relationship manager

⋅ Business analyst

⋅ Service level manager

⋅ Catalog manager

⋅ Knowledge manager

What are the skills

needed by IT

experts in the

Service Brokering

model?

⋅ Soft skills and customer

orientation

⋅ Software integration skills

⋅ Relationship with suppliers and

negotiation

⋅ Financial skills

⋅ Strategic thinking

⋅ Service improvement

What are the

resources required

by IT experts in the

Service Brokering

model?

⋅ IT strategic plans

⋅ Business cases

⋅ Service performance reports

⋅ Business requirements

⋅ Contracts and SLAs

⋅ Business objectives

achievement report

⋅ Service portfolio and catalog

What are the capabilities required by the IT

function in the Service Brokering model?

To respond to this question, we understand a

Capability as the particular ability that a company

possesses to achieve a specific purpose or result

(Blair and Marshall, 2016). The following

capabilities for the IT department were extracted from

the revision.

(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).

Besides this capability includes to obtain good value

for money from suppliers and ensuring that all

contracts and agreements with them meet business

needs (AXELOS, 2017).

(ii) Service catalog management. This capability

includes providing and maintaining the service

catalog and ensuring its availability to those who are

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

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

2017) (TheOpenGroup, 2017).

(iii) Requirement management. It consists in

identifying customer needs, analyzing and

prioritizing them according to the business strategy

and, in conjunction with the catalog management

capability, finding a service that meets such needs

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

2012) (TheOpenGroup, 2017).

(iv) Service level management (SLM). It is related

to the negotiation, specification, design, publication,

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).

(v) Offer management. It is in charge of

publishing the service portal entries and defining with

precision and detail the services, including

dependencies and prices (TheOpenGroup, 2017). It is

also responsible for grouping specific offers for a

specific group of customers (TheOpenGroup, 2017).

(vi) Demand management. It is specifically

responsible for analyzing requirements, creating

service requests, directing them to suppliers in

collaboration with supplying management, as well as

recording service consumption patterns

(TheOpenGroup, 2017).

(vii) Knowledge management. This capability

includes to collect, analyze, store and share

knowledge 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.

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(viii) Customer relationship management. It

focuses on the relationship with customers, which

includes to identify potential customers and their

strategic needs, assign a responsible to manage the

relationship to each one of them, establish

communication mechanisms and manage complaints

from them (Fitsm, 2017).

(ix) Service portfolio management. It is

responsible for ensuring that the service provider has

the right mix of services to meet required business

outcomes at an appropriate level of investment.

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

2014b) (TheOpenGroup, 2017) (AXELOS, 2017)

(TheOpenGroup, 2017).

What are the roles required by IT experts in the

Service Brokering model?

The following IT expert roles were identified as

important in this model:

(i) Supplier and partner manager: This role

addresses simultaneously the management of

multiple suppliers. It works in conjunction with the

legal office to conclude contracts and agreements

with suppliers. (Erbes et al., 2012) (Gefen et al.,

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

(Rackspace, 2014b) (HewlettPackard, 2013)

(Stratecast, 2016).

(ii) Service manager: It is in charge of managing

the lifecycle of services including the contracting,

implementation, evaluation and continuous

management of new and existing services (Erbes et

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

(Stratecast, 2016) (ISACA, 2012).

(iii) Service Portfolio Manager: It is responsible

for ensuring that the service provider has an adequate

offer of services by analyzing financial, demand and

risk aspects. This role produces analysis documents

to help executive managers to make decisions about

adequate sourcing models (insourcing, outsourcing,

cloud, etc.) and service options to fulfill customer’s

needs.

(iv) IT service integration specialist: this role is in

charge of developing integration modules for services

from different suppliers in order to offer a unique

service to the customer (Rackspace, 2014a)

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

and Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009).

(v) Enterprise architect: This role has a holistic

view of the company's needs at strategic, tactical and

operational levels. It is in charge of align IT

infrastructure and services with the evolution of such

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

(vi) IT Financial manager/controller: Since IT is

one of the biggest expenditure aspects in companies,

it becomes indispensable to have roles in charge of IT

cost accounting, financial forecasting, and decision

making process. Such roles need to work in

collaboration with the portfolio manager (Gefen et al.,

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

Zvi, 2012) (HewlettPackard, 2013).

(vii) Strategic Advisor: The strategic objectives of

the company can be leveraged through the adequate

IT strategy and services. Therefore, expert

consultants or auditors are required to advise the

business from technology possibilities (Gefen et al.,

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

Zvi, 2012) (HewlettPackard, 2013).

(viii) Business relationship manager (BRM): The

professional in charge of maintaining a positive

relationship with customers (AXELOS, 2017). The

BRM identifies the strategic needs of existing and

potential customers and ensures that appropriate

services are acquired to meet those needs.

(ix) Business analyst: A role that is in contact with

customers and users and is responsible for the

requirements management from tactical and

operational viewpoints (Erbes et al., 2012)

(Rackspace, 2014a) (TheOpenGroup, 2017).

(x) Service level manager: the role responsible for

negotiating and defining service level agreements

(SLA) and ensuring that they are met (AXELOS,

2017) (Fitsm, 2017).

(xi) Catalog manager: it defines and maintains the

service catalog, and ensures that all the information

contained in the catalog is accurate and up-to-date

(AXELOS, 2017) (Fitsm, 2017).

(xii) Knowledge manager: It ensures that the IT

organization is able to collect, analyze, store and

share knowledge and information (AXELOS, 2017).

What are the skills needed by IT experts in the

Service Brokering model?

Skills are grouped by subject and described as

follows:

(i) Relationship with suppliers and negotiation: It

include skills to deal with searching, evaluating,

integrating and orchestrating multiple suppliers, and

having the ability to maintain good relations with

them and other external partners (Erbes et al., 2012)

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

(Rackspace, 2014a) (Stratecast, 2016) (AXELOS,

2017). It requires knowledge in market analysis and

how to negotiate and obtain mutually beneficial

contracts. In order to work in collaboration with the

legal office to contract suppliers, IT experts also need

skills in the legal and contractual aspects of IT

outsourcing (Gefen et al., 2011) (Ragowsky et al.,

2014).

Towards a Service Brokering Model for IT Departments

185

(ii) Financial skills: Skills in cost accounting,

financial controlling, budget management, financial

indicators and financial forecasting are necessary in

this new model (Gefen et al., 2011) (Willcocks et al.,

2012) (Ragowsky et al., 2014) (HewlettPackard,

2013) (Stratecast, 2016). Even though these kind of

skills already exist in financial and accounting

departments, professionals of such areas do not know

the specific characteristics of IT service and project

management so that these skills are also necessary in

IT staff.

(iii) Strategic thinking: IT experts need strategic

and critical thinking, analytical skills, capability for

decision making, problem solving skills, creativity

and strategic analysis (Erbes et al., 2012) (Ragowsky

et al., 2014) (Rohmeyer and Ben-Zvi, 2012)

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

(iv) Soft skills and customer orientation: These

skills include communication at the commercial level,

team work, negotiating capacity, conflict resolution,

integrity, interpersonal skills and flexibility. Those

are essential because of the continuous and intensive

relationship with customers, users and other

stakeholder (Erbes et al., 2012).

(v) Software development skills: When services

are contracted from different providers, and

integration is required to solve a business need, IT

experts should have software development skills on

multiple platforms to undertake such integration

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

and Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2009).

(vi) Service improvement: IT experts should have

the ability to generate clear SLAs, service

performance metrics and continuous monitoring to

take preventive and corrective measures and develop

improvement plans (Hoyer and Stanoevska-Slabeva,

2009) (Rackspace, 2014b) (Stratecast, 2016)

(AXELOS, 2017).

What are the resources required by IT experts in

the Service Brokering model?

(i) IT strategic plans: It makes reference to

strategic goals, objectives, strategies and plans

formulated to lead IT in alignment to business plans

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

and Ben-Zvi, 2012).

(ii) Business cases: Justification for a significant

item of expenditure. It includes information about

service options, benefits, costs, risks and issues

(AXELOS, 2017).

(iii) Service performance report: report of

achievement and trends against Service Levels

Targets (SLT) agreed in SLAs. The format, content

and frequency of reports should be agreed with

customers.

(iv) Business requirements specification:

Document containing needs and restrictions

expressed by business customers about an IT service

(Erbes et al., 2012).

(v) Contracts and SLAs: A contract is a legally

binding agreement between two or more parties. A

SLA describes the IT service, documents SLT, and

specifies the responsibilities of the IT service

provider and the customer (AXELOS, 2017) (Gefen

et al., 2011).

(vi) Business objectives achievement report:

report of achievement made with the help of IT

against pre-established business objectives (ISACA,

2012).

(vii) Service portfolio and catalog: The service

portfolio contains the complete set of services

managed by a service provider. It includes three

categories: service proposed or in development,

service catalog (in operation or available for

deployment), and retired services (AXELOS, 2017).

3 SERVICE BROKERING

MODEL

From the literature review, we identified and

synthesized a set of common organizational elements

(see Table 1), that can help IT departments to broker

IT services. However, a conceptual model that links

such elements and states their relationship was not

found. For this reason, we decided to carry out a focus

group in order to identify the relationship between the

elements found in the literature review and validate

the extent to which such findings are being

implemented in the industry. A conceptual model is

then proposed from this activity.

3.1 Focus Group Activity

A focus group is a popular qualitative research

technique, which consists in small groups of people

guided by a moderator through an unstructured and

spontaneous discussion with the aim of obtaining

relevant information about a research problem

(Greenbaum, 1988). For this research work, the

focus group included 8 IT professionals working in

different positions in large international companies

operating in a South-American country. We

conducted the activity through a spontaneous

discussion by asking the percentage of outsourced

services the participants had in their departments and

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which were the main capabilities, roles, skills and

resources in their IT areas. The main results are

described as follows:

• Capabilities: the main capabilities referred by the

participants were requirement, service level and

supplier management. As request fulfillment was

not indicated by any participant, this capability is

not included in the model. Because of the

unstructured and spontaneous nature of the

activity, there was room for participants to talk

about other IT capabilities that are not necessarily

involved in role of IT as a service broker such as

software development and incident management.

They argued that those more “technical”

capabilities are becoming less common in their

departments.

• Roles: Regarding the roles form the review,

supplier manager and business and requirement

analysts were the most common. Even though

development and operation roles such as software

developer, as well as server, DB and network

administrators, were also referred. However, the

participants argued that those roles are less and

less necessary in their organizations.

• Skills: Participants argued that skills such as

supplier management and systems integration

skills are increasingly required. Spontaneously

they said that technical skills in software,

hardware, operating systems and DB are still

required in their departments.

• Resources: The participants agreed on the

importance today of the resources identified in the

literature review. However they emphasized that

their IT departments still have infrastructure

resources such as development tools, applications,

servers, networks, etc.

• Relationships: The relationships identified

between the elements are described in the next

subsection.

This activity allowed us to gather new

information that indicates that even though IT areas

have advanced to the implementation of the service

broker role, in most of the cases they continue to

implement the traditional role of IT service developer

and operator. From these findings, we propose a

develop a Service Brokering model in the next

subsection.

3.2 Towards a Service Brokering

Model

In Figure 1 we propose a conceptual model that

includes the organizational elements and their

relationship found during the literature review and the

focus group activity. This model shows six types of

elements: (i) External role: stakeholders that

participate outside the IT department, i.e., customers,

suppliers and executive board. (ii) Internal role: it

relates groups of people with related responsibilities

that participate within the IT department, e.g.,

supplier and partner manager or business analyst. (iii)

Capability: it concerns a set of activities to obtain a

specific objective. Capabilities are described in bold

font in the figure, e.g., demand management and

catalog management. (iv) Management resource: an

essential element or asset used by the IT function to

broker services, e.g., contracts and SLAs. (vi)

Relationship: it is used to represent the connections

or interactions between capabilities.

Several integration sequences between

capabilities can be identified by navigating the

relationships between them. We describe one of these

sequences in which business requirements are

fulfilled through contracting a new service with an

external supplier (see Figure 1): The customer raises

requirements that are gathered by the requirement

management (functional requirements), business

relationship management (strategic requirements) or

service level management (service level

requirements) capabilities. Then, such requirements

are correlated in order to identify similar existing

demand or create new demand. Such demand is

prioritized and converted in requests for new or

modified services by the demand management

capability according to the strategic business plan.

These requests are then addressed by the portfolio

management capability through the identification of

several service options and sourcing models that

could fulfill them. For each service request, a

business case including financial, risk and functional

aspects is thus built in order to evaluate the different

options and be presented to the company’s Executive

Board that decides for the best option. Then, supplier

management will contact the external supplier

offering the selected service option. Once the SLA

and contract has been agreed and signed by both

parts, the service catalog and portfolio are updated by

the catalog and portfolio management capabilities

respectively. In addition, an entry with the new

service will be added into the service portal by the

offer capability in order to make it accessible by the

customer. In the portal customers can consult detailed

information about the services that are ready to

consume. When a customer is interested in a service,

she makes a request that is managed by the offer

management. Transversely to all the aforementioned

interaction, the knowledge management capability

Towards a Service Brokering Model for IT Departments

187

Figure 1: Conceptual model for IT service brokering.

gathers and registers knowledge generated by

suppliers and the IT department in order to make it

available to other capabilities and customers.

4 CONCLUSIONS

This article proposes a conceptual model which

synthesizes the main organizational elements that

need to be implemented by the IT area when working

as a service broker. The main conclusions of the work

made are described as follows.

Concerning capabilities, IT departments are

moving from focusing on technical capabilities to

organizational ones. For instance, today IT

departments require a supplier management

capability, similar to the one of the procurement

department, allowing the organization to access to

external IT services. Regarding roles of IT experts,

we identified an increase in new roles in the following

areas: (i) Management, IT experts that coordinate and

manages IT suppliers, contracts, services and

customers; (ii) consultancy, experts who advise to

make sound decisions for the organization; and (iii)

technology: technology experts that integrate and

customize IT services and leverage the business

strategy through technology. In addition, we found

that although technical traditional roles in service

development and operation are still present in

organizations, they are less common and are being

shifted towards supplier companies. Regarding

resources, they follow the same way that capabilities

in the sense that IT departments are moving from

focusing on technical resources (such as applications,

servers or routers) to management resources (such as

contracts and SLAs) allowing them to manage

intermediation between suppliers and customers.

Concerning future work, further research is

needed in order to improve the conceptual model

presented in this work. First, it is necessary to carry

out a complete analysis of all the potential sequences

between capabilities by analyzing the whole set of

relationships between them. Second, research efforts

are necessary in order to understand how is the

interaction between the capabilities of the IT Service

Brokering model and the capabilities of the traditional

IT service development and operation models. Third,

to validate the model, it is necessary to use additional

methodology tools such as case studies or surveys.

This could add more information from more

companies and different sources.

Concerning the IT service brokering as a subject

of study, one of the main findings is the lack of

academic and industrial research works and best

practices in this domain, which has had repercussion

in the ability of companies to migrate to this model.

(Rackspace, 2014b) shows that most IT executives

see the IT Service Brokering model as a priority but

only 25 percent have made a progress in its adoption.

Furthermore, according to (Wadhwa, 2014), there is

a clear gap in academic research in the area. From the

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literature review presented in this work, we can

observe 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. Only IT4IT (The Open Group, 2017) has

specifically proposed the Request to Fulfill (R2F)

workflow that helps IT organizations to move

towards a service intermediary model. As a

consequence, we consider that there is a need for

academics and practitioners to get involved in studies

regarding organizational change and transformation

(Avila and Garces, 2016) as well as tools, models,

best practices and case studies to improve the

contributions in the IT service brokering area. Last

but not least, the link of this research domain with the

decision making domain is necessary in order to

provide a holistic approach to practitioners allowing

them to cover from service and provider selection to

service performance follow-up (Ruiz and Avila,

2017).

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