Paper Type

Completed Research Paper

Abstract

The industrialization of the IT service industry aims at transferring concepts of traditional manufacturing companies to IT service providers in order to achieve efficiency gains. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been irreplaceable for traditional manufacturing industries in achieving today’s efficiency level. As the provisioning of IT services exhibits parallels to traditional manufacturing the transfer of ERP concepts could be valuable in helping IT service providers become more efficient.

The current state of the art of academically researched, full-fledged ERP systems is assessed via a comprehensive structured literature review. The search space spanned 97 selected journals and 27 conferences from 1996 to 2012.

This review yields only six relevant publications which suggests that this is a niche topic in mainstream IS research. It is argued that a reference model for an ERP for the IT service industry would be beneficial to improve the efficiency of IT service providers.

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ERP for the IT Service Industry: A Structured Literature Review

The industrialization of the IT service industry aims at transferring concepts of traditional manufacturing companies to IT service providers in order to achieve efficiency gains. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been irreplaceable for traditional manufacturing industries in achieving today’s efficiency level. As the provisioning of IT services exhibits parallels to traditional manufacturing the transfer of ERP concepts could be valuable in helping IT service providers become more efficient.

The current state of the art of academically researched, full-fledged ERP systems is assessed via a comprehensive structured literature review. The search space spanned 97 selected journals and 27 conferences from 1996 to 2012.

This review yields only six relevant publications which suggests that this is a niche topic in mainstream IS research. It is argued that a reference model for an ERP for the IT service industry would be beneficial to improve the efficiency of IT service providers.