Towards TQM in IT services

In the past five years, more and more information technology (IT) projects have been adopting service-oriented solutions. In addition, more and more traditional business and government organizations are focused on clearly identifying and monitoring the core IT services they are delivering. The remarkable growth of web service technologies and service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions yields both challenges and opportunities in improving the quality of IT services and has given rise to a variety of IT service management frameworks like IT Infrastructure Library (ITU) and Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMJ). This paper presents the problem of total quality management (TQM) in IT services, followed by a review of quality definitions from four levels of perspectives. Based on the comparison of the different definitions, the necessity of integration of quality measurement and improvement approaches is identified and our preliminary work on TQM in IT services is introduced.