The world economy continues to evolve away from the traditional producer-consumer roles prevalent in the industrial era, towards more dynamical, collaborative business relationships characteristic of the emerging global services economy. New challenges are emerging for businesses engaged in service delivery, particularly concerning process normalization and cost estimation. Service standardization is being addressed at IBM through careful analysis of historical service deals and the development of “best practice” standards for service solutions. The Solution Definition Manager (SDM) is a platform developed at IBM through a close collaboration among research and business representatives, designed to support the flexible creation of global service solutions within standards, as well as subsequent cost estimation and pricing of those solutions at fine level of granularity. In this paper, the SDM is discussed in terms of how and why it is being developed as well as the business transformation it represents. An analysis is presented of how research and business groups within IBM have co-created value by transforming internal processes, and how the SDM in turn allows IBM to be a better partner for value co-production while delivering services to external clients.
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