A Continuous Dispatch Decision Model for Sustainable IT Service Assignments

Introduction

As companies increasingly rely on information technologies (IT), the maintenance of IT also requires sustainable services, termed IT services. Due to the concern of focusing on core business and transferring risks, many organizations choose to outsource their IT services. From the perspective of resource management, IT service providers often have restricted resources, especially the workforce, to implement professional services for the clients; they must control the usage of the human resources and optimize the utilization while meeting the service delivery requirements (Howel et al., 2018; Verlaine, 2017; Orta et al., 2014; Shahsavarani & Ji, 2014; Steinberg, 2013; Conger, S., 2009). Therefore, how to operationalize the service implementations to warrant customer satisfaction for sustaining the competitiveness under the uncertain and continuous demand of services (Taniguchi & Onosato, 2018; Bardhan et al., 2010; Winniford et al., 2009) is a critical business mission to IT service providers.

Under the modernized operation of enterprises, IT services are considered a long-term project to perform ad-hoc services requested with several particular service requirements (Diao et al., 2016, Gupta & Lawsirirat, 2013). Specifically, the implementation of each service request during the project period requires the assigned personnel/workers to travel to the incident site to complete the service promptly. Besides the limited human resources, timeliness and different severity levels of the services are also the major requirements for the assignment decision. If the assignment fails to meet the service requirements, a penalty often incurs and increases the cost to the provider. Moreover, IT failures often occur unexpectedly and repeatedly, resulting in unpredictable arrival of service requests at different customer sites. Hence, in the planning task of worker assignment to service, characteristics such as multiple service arrival, service decentralization, and the multi-period situation should also be considered.

In literature, worker assignment has been important research. However, existing studies of this research mainly either only consider the multi-task or multi-period solution that is for a single project, or mostly focus on a one-time assignment or are scoped to the centralized service scenario (Mehrabad et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2013; Delgoshaei et al., 2017). To extend these studies, this paper develops a continuous decision model termed multi-period, multi-distributed service assignment model (MPDSA) to realize sustainable IT service assignment. Specifically, the model addresses the issues regarding the sustainable IT service assignment as follows: (1) In decentralized dispatch environments, IT service providers need a systematic process for continuously conducting service assignments and overseeing personnel efficiently; (2) During each time of assignment, IT organizations need to arrange the continually effectively arrived service requests, assign suitable workers to service requests to minimize the costs due to service postpone or delay, or place them in queue order and replan them in next periods; (3) When re-planning, service providers need to consider the severity of an unassigned service request, as well as the costs of waiting or halting existing services due to the insertion of new requests. In the assignment decision, MPDSA employs Binary Integer Programming (BIP) for the worker assignments. It then optimizes the planning solutions by considering and minimizing several types of operational costs due to the characteristics of IT service and sustainability to achieve the best overall project benefit for service providers.