On Assessing the Competitiveness of IT Service Solutions

We present a method and a system for assessing the competitiveness of IT service solutions. The method enables sales teams to assess the competitiveness of their IT service solutions created during the sales phase in response to request for proposal (RfP). It involves comparing unit costs and unit prices of a given solution with those of client expectations, comparable prior deals and agreed upon rates defined within an IT service provider organization, competition and market. Our contributions include an approach to modeling IT service solutions in a consistent manner to enable comparison. This is a pre-requisite to the second step of comparing IT service solutions. Second, an approach to comparing IT service solutions is proposed. The approach takes into account structured and unstructured attributes as well as qualitative and quantitative values of attributes during comparison. We are currently performing precision and recall experiments at an IT service organization using 200 prior deals. Initial results are encouraging. In the absense of any prior tools to do this, our system is already proving to be a valuable asset to the IT service organization that we are developing the solution for.