Enterprise Service Management between IT Organization and IT Architecture Thinking: A Clarifying Literature Review

Given the dispersed nature of the term Enterprise Service Management (ESM) across different research fields and the heterogeneous understanding of ESM even within single fields, the purpose of this literature review is to sharpen concept clarity of ESM for future research. We address the research question on how we can synthesize existing knowledge on ESM and clarify the term. Our systematic literature review finds that ESM appears mainly in two research fields: the customer and process-centric ESM related to the IT organization thinking and system-centric ESM related to IT architecture thinking. Our contribution is a unifying definition of ESM: ESM is an approach that aims at transforming and managing organizational workflows as services, which can be used by internal or external customers to fulfill business or IT requests. ESM is created as an interplay of an open yet interconnected enterprise organization, a component-based architecture of services, and support of technology independent standardization tools.