An essential part of IT outsourcing is to move the customer's IT environment into the service provider's mode of operation, which is known as customer on- boarding. It covers every aspect of transition and transformation, from the time the customer signs the contract to the time the provider can deliver steady- state IT services. In order to improve the repeatability and enforce adoption of best practices, a standard set of processes should be established to direct, control, and measure on-boarding activities for each customer. However, this process is very complex and often gets modified according to customer environments and requirements. It is very difficult to incorporate customizations needed for diverse scenarios into a single on-boarding process model. These process variations may lead to undesirable consequences, such as projects delays or even discontinuation of contract. In this paper, we propose an ontology and rule based approach to model and configure process variants for on-boarding customers to IT outsourcing. In this approach, the standard on- boarding process and business context that characterize various scenarios are captured in an ontological framework. Further, semantic rules model adaptation policies and help generate a customized process variant schema on the fly. Based on this framework, we developed a prototype to support process variant configuration. Further, we show that our approach can facilitate the configuration of process variants based on various customer needs and the management of process variants in a large repository.
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