Measuring the Operational Maturity of Business Services

Abstract

This thesis was made to decrease the service maturity variation level of the case company’s customer facing business services. In this context, the maturity refers to the operational quality of a customer facing business service, and how ready the services are for the production environment. The thesis was carried out as an action research. To be able to develop the current maturity of the service, the first step was to create a way to measure the service maturity. The thesis explored the service maturity measurement concept and utilized the current best practices. To find out which aspects affect the current service variance the most, certain stakeholders who were daily affected by the service maturity variance, were interviewed. With the help of these interviews, the most important components that affect the service maturity were recognized. In addition, related literature and best practices were utilized. This thesis produced a tool for measuring business service maturity and utilized it to measure currently active business services. With the help of the measurement tool, the company gained a visibility over the most critical causes of the maturity variation. By focusing development actions into these entities, the case company can now enhance the service development, which will in turn lead into decreased service maturity variance.