The bridge of dreams: Towards a method for operational performance alignment in IT-enabled service supply chains

Concerns on performance alignment, especially on business-IT alignment, have been around for three decades. It is still considered to be one of the most important driving forces for business success, as well as one of the top concerns of many practitioners and organizational researchers. It is also found to be a major issue in two thirds of digital transformation projects. Many attempts from researchers in diverse disciplines have been made to tackle this issue. Unfortunately, they have been working separately and the research appears in various forms and names.
This dissertation presents a piece of interdisciplinary research that focuses on identifying operational performance alignment issues, discovering and assessing their root causes with attention to the dynamics in operating IT-enabled service supply chain (SSC). It makes a modest contribution by providing a communication-centred instrument which can modularize complex SSC in terms of a hierarchically-structured set of services and analyze the performance causality between them. With a special focus on the impact of IT, it makes it possible to monitor and tune various performance issues in SSC.
This research intends to provide a solution-oriented common ground where multiple service research streams can meet together. Following the framework proposed in this research, services, at different tiers of an SSC, are modelled with a balanced perspective on both business, technical service components and KPIs. It allows a holistic picture of service performances and interactions throughout the entire supply chain to be viewed through a different research lens and permits the causal impact of technology, business strategy, and service operations on supply chain performance to be unveiled.