Modeling and Configuration of Process Variants for On-Boarding Customers to IT Outsourcing

An essential part of IT outsourcing is to move the customer's IT environment into the service provider's mode of operation, which is known as customer on-boarding. It covers every aspect of transition and transformation, from the time the customer signs the contract to the time the provider can deliver steady-state IT services. In order to improve the repeatability and enforce adoption of best practices, a standard set of processes should be established to direct, control, and measure on-boarding activities for each customer. However, this process is very complex and often gets adapted according to customer environments and requirements. It is very difficult to incorporate process variants needed for diverse scenarios into a single on-boarding process model, so that they can be reused. In this paper, we propose an approach based on ontology and rules to model the standard on-boarding process and configure process variants based on the business context that characterizes various scenarios. Further, semantic rules model adaptation policies and help generate a customized process variant schema on the fly. Based on this framework, we have developed a prototype to support process variant configuration. We also discuss the flexibility of our approach, and present its cost-benefit analysis.