Infrastructures of virtual IT enterprises

Service quality has become a critical survivability factor. The value of IT-business does not only lie in the products but also in the needs it serves. More and more customers require the IT companies with which they do business to continuously improve the speed and quality of their service. To provide seamless high quality service, the collaborating IT-companies/departments must organize themselves in a way so that they can act as one virtual enterprise providing a single point of contact. In this paper, we study how thirty eight companies belonging to thirty seven independent virtual enterprises have organized themselves in order to provide optimal maintenance service to their customers. Our goal is to provide a basis for future support process models and for future business models. Our results show strongly diversified infrastructures of confluent service organizations. These infrastructures were matched against CM³: Roadmap: Organizational Perspective.