1 Enhancing service productivity with customer integration – A viable connection

Customer integration in the development and management of services (namely: the service lifecycle) is an important prerequisite for improving service productivity, even more so if adequate controlling instruments are put to practice. To research this hypothesis, the specifics of customer in-tegration and measuring service productivity are discussed as well as the potential of IT and the customer as resources leading to a sustainable competitive advantage. As a result, a dynamic management of service productivity is proposed and underlined by case study evidence showing that the improvement of service productivity strongly depends on the inter-linking of customer integration and IT-based customer controlling. 1. The importance of customer integration and service productivity – Problem definition and research questions The increase of research output to improve productivity of information technology (IT) services is of great importance for Germany as an industrial location. In light of th