CROSS Martin, DBA

Martin Cross studied computer science, psychology and a MBA, worked as IT manager in the siderurgical and mining sector holding European, African and Middle East responsibilities. Afterwards he moved to the financial sector as IT manager of the private bank sector of a major bank worldwide. He is now general manager of an organization specialised in service management providing consultancy services worldwide.

He defended his Executive Doctorate in Business Administration (EDBA) in September 2020 on the subject “Proposal of a new service orientation maturity model: the case of Information Technology service providers of financial institutions in Luxembourg”, under the direction of Professor Kiane Goudarzi, University of Lyon, iaelyon, France.

Pr Kiane Goudarzi

Proposal of a new service orientation maturity model: the case of information technology service providers of financial institutions in Luxembourg.

Services play an essential role in today’s economy. Many organizations are transforming their operations to be more service-oriented. While the products that competitors offer are similar, organizations are using a variety of services to differentiate them-selves from competitors. Technology, communication, mobility and connectivity play an important role in the way that organizations run their business, reach customers and build their services. At the same time, technology is evolving at an ever-increasing rate. Hence, organizations struggle to keep up with this technological evolution as well as their transformation towards a service-oriented organization. Despite that there are several IT Service Management references on the market, organizations find difficulties to implement and measure them. The aim of this research is to analyze these difficulties and propose specific tools, such as a new Service Orienta-tion maturity model, that would assist organizations in their transformation process. The focalization of this research is the Service Orientation maturity of IT service pro-viders of financial institutions in Luxembourg. The reason for this specific choice is that the financial sector of Luxembourg plays an important role in the country’s econ-omy. Additionally, there is an important dependency on IT services to support the financial institutions’ operations and services.
The global research approach is based on two studies. The first study is meant to clarify the research context and understand the issues that the studied organizations are facing as they implement Service Orientation practices. For that purpose, a detailed description of the context is presented and an extensive academic literature review was carried out in order to learn what has already been studied in the Service Science area within the specific context of the research. A gap in the literature was found related to the specific context of the research, therefore an exploratory research was carried out to better understand the specific studied population. For the exploratory research phase, I studied 15 organizations in order to have a better understanding of their view on Service Orientation and the importance of Service Orientation within each company. Moreover, I explored the different references that they use as guidance for their IT Service Management practices, the difficulties that they face and the way that they measure the maturity of their IT Service Management practices.
The results of this exploratory research confirmed that the IT service providers of fi-nancial institutions in Luxembourg are committed to a strong Service Orientation but they find it difficult to implement, use and measure their Service Orientation. Most of the studied organizations use ITIL as their main reference. In addition to that, it was confirmed that the existing IT service maturity models are too complex and expensive to use, therefore most organizations are unable to measure their maturity.
The second study details one of the gaps discovered during the exploratory research related to the measurement of the studied organizations’ Service Orientation maturity. I henceforth updated the context. Additionally, a review of the literature specific to this new context is presented. This analysis shows the need of a new Service Orientation maturity model. Therefore, the focalization of the research towards the creation of a new Service Orientation maturity model. The new model (Organizational Service Ori-entation Maturity Model) intends to help organizations measure their Service Orientation maturity. I applied the new model at 13 organizations to assess their maturity by interviewing 17 IT service managers, 24 IT staff members, 17 customers and 22 users for a total of 80 interviews. After this analysis, a maturity profile of each organization was established and afterwards consolidated into a global profile of the studied sample, representing 10% of the studied population.
The usage of the new model proved to be useful to the studied organizations. It provides a clear structure that is easy to use, cost and time efficient, and reliable. Compared to other models, the new model proposed in this study allows organizations to considerably reduce the time and cost required for a maturity assessment. This allows them to use it at regular intervals to understand their current status, to guide them in their improvement projects, to understand their evolution and to benchmark the organization. This research contributes to the Service Science domain in the field of Service Orientation by providing insight into established IT Service Management practices in the studied organizations, the importance of Service Orientation and confronted difficulties. This research also contributes to the Service Orientation area by proposing a valuable maturity model that can help organizations in their Service Orientation implementation process. Also, it provides a clear view of the maturity status of the actual situation of an organization. Additionally, the research documents the Service Orientation maturity profiles of the studied organizations in the sample as well as a global representative maturity profile for IT service providers of financial institutions in Lux-embourg. Lastly, it provides some insight into IT service providers of other areas, facing the same difficulties as the studied body of organizations.