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IT Service Quality in Outsourcing Relationships

  • Chapter
Collaboration in Outsourcing

Part of the book series: Technology, Work and Globalization ((TWG))

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Abstract

For many outsourcing service providers, the Deming circle often comes down to Plan, Do, Hope, and Forget. The service providers start planning, and delivering the service accordingly, but forget to check whether the delivered service actually meets the quality expectations. The reason that so many service providers stop after the first two phases can be attributed to the fact that it is difficult to measure the actual service quality that is delivered to the customer and to identify areas for improvement. This chapter aims to develop a model that addresses the estimation of IT service quality in an outsourcing relationship. Based on the SERVQUAL model and inspired by the intense debates on the correctness of the model, this chapter tries to combine the favorable characteristics of the SERVQUAL and derived models. By uniting the best aspects of every model, managers are given an instrument that delivers valuable information on the level of service quality that customers expect and how they perceive the delivered quality. If service providers use the tool that is presented in this chapter, they finally will be able change their Deming cycle into Plan, Do, Check, and Act.

“In God we trust; all others must bring data.”

W. Edwards Deming

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Authors
  1. Jonathan Aarnouts
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Netherlands

    Sjaak Brinkkemper (Professor of Organization and Information) (Professor of Organization and Information)

  2. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Netherlands

    Slinger Jansen (Assistant Professor) (Assistant Professor)

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© 2012 Jonathan Aarnouts

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Aarnouts, J. (2012). IT Service Quality in Outsourcing Relationships. In: Brinkkemper, S., Jansen, S. (eds) Collaboration in Outsourcing. Technology, Work and Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230362994_13

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