Microsoft Word Volume 2 Service and Service Quality Final docx

Figure 1: The Detailed Business Service Management Framework
(Rosemann, Fielt, Kohlborn, and Korthaus, 2009)
Service Supplier 
Management 
Service Performance 
Management
Service Compliance
& Risk 
Service Customer 
Management 
Service 
Publishing 
Service Quality Management 
Service Master Data Management 
Service Purchasing 
Service Technology Management 

---

Business Service Management White Paper - Volume 2 
Page 7 of 46 
This white paper begins to address the suggested gap, by first exploring the extant literature to 
understand the complexities impeding derivation of such a generic service quality model, and 
subsequently by suggesting a means of containing this complexity in order to enable us to propose a 
sufficiently general model of service quality. As the following discussion reveals, due to a lack of a 
unifying theory, the main difficulties stem from the different perspectives, purposes, participants, 
types, channels of delivery, and/or characteristics of services that underlie the various reported 
research. This white paper proposes that, to meet the needs of Smart Services CRC, we focus on the 
perception of the quality of multi-channelled services from a consumer’s perspective (with the 
underlying aim of improving consumers’ satisfaction). 
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. The exploration begins with review of the literature 
on service definitions and conceptualisations. The review of service definitions highlights the different 
views defined by various perspectives and purposes, implicit and explicit, as embraced by the different 
researchers. Based on observations from the literature, and adopting recommendations made in more 
recent research, we next define the scope of our conceptualisation and attempt to arrive at a broad 
definition of a service that represents an integrated synthesis of these differing views. We then review 
literature on service classifications. The initial purpose of this review was to identify any existing, 
generic classification or ontology, that suggests possible core attributes of a general conceptualisation 
of service. We found, however, that just as there are myriad conceptualisations of services based on 
different perspectives and purposes, there are too a diversity of classifications that are based on 
different attributes of services. This paper selectively presents those more widely adopted 
classifications that highlight the complexities associated with any attempt to synthesize an all-purpose 
service definition and model. Review of service quality literature further reveals the richness and 
variety of models that have been developed to account for different service industries (retail, 
healthcare, banking etc), types of services (traditional, electronic, multi-channelled), and types of 
participants (business-to-business, consumer-to-business, consumer-to-consumer, etc). Using our 
proposed service definition as the scope of our service quality model, we propose an integrated service 
quality model. Finally, we conclude by highlighting the recommendations from this research and a 
proposed research agenda.