Features of IT service markets: A systematic literature review

Abstract

The provision of IT solutions over electronic marketplaces became prominent in recent years. We call such marketplaces IT service markets. IT service markets have some core architectural building blocks that impact the quality attributes of these markets. However, these building blocks and their impacts are not well-known. Thus, design choices for IT service markets have been made ad-hoc until now. Furthermore, only single aspects of such markets have been investigated until now, but a comprehensive view is missing. In this paper, we identify common features and their interrelations on the basis of a systematic literature review of 60 publications using grounded theory. This knowledge provides an empirical evidence on the interdisciplinary design choices of IT service markets and it serves as a basis to support market providers and developers to integrate market features. Thereby, we make a first step towards the creation of a reference model for IT service markets that provides a holistic integrated view that can be used to create and maintain successful markets in the future.