Multi-Organisation Ticket Management in B2B Service Ecosystems

Abstract

Modern Business-to-Business (B2B) service ecosystems depend on multiple interdependent or- ganisations to deliver value to end customers. When incidents occur, their resolution requires coordination that crosses organisational boundaries. Yet widely used commercial ITSM tools, such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, and Zendesk, still organise cross-entity collabora- tion mainly through local records, links, sharing agreements, or synchronisation between systems. In practice, when external partners must be involved, tickets tend to be replicated or referenced across systems, coordination relies on informal channels or partial integrations, and the resulting loss of context, duplicated effort, and fragmented visibility are treated as unavoidable. This fragmentation also affects the technicians who perform the operational work: re-entering information, tracking status across separate systems, and coordinating responses with partners increase repetitive effort and reduce visibility of individual contribution. Therefore, besides the architectural question, the dissertation examines whether gamification elements can support tech- nician engagement without compromising service quality. This dissertation addresses two research questions: (RQ1) How can centralised ticket- management solutions be architected to support formal incident routing across organisations in B2B service ecosystems, while preserving the identity, history, and end-to-end metrics of each ticket? and (RQ2) How can gamification elements be designed and integrated into the inter- organisational ticket lifecycle in a way that supports technician engagement without distorting service-quality priorities or introducing unfair competitive dynamics across organisations? The research follows a Design Science Research approach, organised around three contributions. First, the dissertation's central contribution is an architectural and domain model for treating the inter-organisational ticket as a first-class entity: a single authoritative record shared across par- ticipating organisations, in which responsibility is transferred through formal events rather than by copying tickets between systems. The model also defines organisation-scoped visibility, end- to-end and per-organisation metrics from the same data source, and gamification mechanisms integrated without coupling to the core ticket logic. The underlying design knowledge is articu- lated as a transferable architectural pattern - the Canonical Inter-Organisational Aggregate- applicable to other cross-organisational coordination domains. Second, this model is materialised in Flowzao, implemented as a functional proof of concept and deployed in production. The platform is treated as an instantiation of the proposed architec- ture, allowing the canonical ticket, formal routing events, configurable visibility, and gamification integration to be evaluated in real coordinated workflows. The evaluation combines three instru- ments: a structured assessment against the six requirements within scope (R1-R4, R6, R7); an in-ecosystem pilot in which collaborating organisations exercise the platform under their own co- ordinated workflows; and a public multilingual problem-validation questionnaire. This question- naire probes the same fragmentation symptoms with respondents who have not used the platform, providing an industry-side signal independent of the pilot. Third, the dissertation contributes a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that synthesises 20 iii iv primary studies across three domains: inter-organisational fault and incident management ar- chitectures, ITSM process challenges in outsourced and multi-vendor environments, and multi- tenant platform architectures for service management. The review provides the theoretical basis for the model, identifies seven requirements and seven research gaps, and confirms that inter- organisational ticket management remains a severely underexplored area: existing work treats ticket integration as a data synchronisation problem between independent systems, without intro- ducing a canonical ticket entity with formal routing semantics.