Quality Management in Service Ecosystems
Christoph Riedl
1
, Tilo Böhmann
1
, Michael Rosemann
2
and Helmut Krcmar
1

1
Chair for Information Systems, Technische Universität München, Boltzmannstr. 3,
85748 Garching bei München, Germany
e-mail: {riedlc, boehmann, krcmar}@in.tum.de
2
BPM Cluster, Faculty of Information Technology
Queensland University of Technology, 126 Margaret Street
Brisbane Qld 4000, Australia
e-mail: m.rosemann@qut.edu.au

Abstract
Service-oriented Architectures and Web services mature and have
become more widely accepted and used by industry. This growing
adoption increased the demands for new ways of using Web
service technology. Users start re-combining and mediating other
providers’ services in ways that have not been anticipated by their
original provider. Within organisations and cross-organisational
communities, discoverable services are organised in repositories
providing convenient access to adaptable end-to-end business
processes. This idea is captured in the term Service Ecosystem.
This paper addresses the question of how quality management
can be performed in such service ecosystems. Service quality
management is a key challenge when services are composed of a
dynamic set of heterogeneous sub-services from different service
providers. This paper contributes to this important area by
developing a reference model of quality management in service
ecosystems. We illustrate the application of the reference model in
an exploratory case study. With this case study, we show how the
reference model helps to derive requirements for the
implementation and support of quality management in an
exemplary service ecosystem in public administration.

Keywords: Quality management, reference model, service
ecosystem, quality of service, Web service, service level
management, requirements engineering

1 Introduction
1
More and more automated and semi-automated business functions are becoming available as
Web services and brokers and mediators increasingly augment these services. Services are
being re-combined in ways that have not been anticipated by their original providers. This
phenomenon is referred to as a Service Ecosystem and is a new and emerging research area
(Barros/Dumas/Bruza, 2005; Barros/Dumas, 2006).
Quality management is a critical management discipline whose importance on
organisational success has been discussed for decades (e.g., Deming, 2000). A significant
correlation between quality and profit has been shown (Gummesson, 2001). Increased quality
has a positive impact on revenue, cost, and the amount of capital employed, and therefore,
leads to increased productivity and higher profits. Concepts such as Total Quality Management
(TQM) are widely used and actively researched (Hackman/Wageman, 1995). Since services are
intangible, non-storable, and collaboratively produced their quality cannot easily be assessed
prior to using the service (Fitzsimmons/Fitzsimmons, 2004). Hence, customers are required to
refer to experience and to build trust with service providers.
Current research on service quality for network-based services mainly focuses on the
functionality, performance, and availability of a technical service (e.g., O’Sullivan/Edmond/ter
Hofstede, 2002; Canfora et al., 2004; Zeng et al., 2004). This is a severe limitation for the
development of service ecosystems because this approach neglects the planning, control, and
recovery of the perceived service quality from the viewpoint of service consumers. Systems
narrowly focusing on technical quality cannot deliver the necessary information for consumer-
focused service quality management. Thus, service quality management creates unique
requirements in service ecosystems due to the high compositionality of services and sub-
services as data on service quality is fundamental for both, planning and controlling services.
This calls for an integrative view of quality management in service ecosystems that combines
the service consumer view and the technical view on services.
The aim of this paper is to integrate the technical as well as the business aspects of quality
management into a reference model to provide a comprehensive view on quality management
for emerging service ecosystems. While this paper is mainly of conceptual nature, we illustrate
how the reference model can be applied to derive requirements for the implementation and
support of quality management by an exploratory case study in public administration.
The paper is structured as follows: In the next section, we contextualise our research by
introducing the notion of service ecosystems. Next, we propose four layers of service quality
management. This four layer model is then further refined into a reference model for quality
management in service ecosystems. Then, an exploratory case study is presented to derive
requirements for the implementation of a service ecosystems platform. Finally, we conclude the
paper, discuss limitations and provide an outlook on potential pathways for future research.
2 Service Ecosystems
The increased maturity of technologies and standards facilitating the development of Web
service-enabled application landscapes has made Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) one of
the most popular approaches for the design of IT landscapes. The core of SOA are services
designed on the premise of representing a set of tightly coupled business functions
(salesforce.com being a prime example). Building on this, entirely new composite services that
implement adaptable end-to-end business processes spanning organisational boundaries are
created. This phenomenon is captured in the concept of a Service Ecosystem:

1
Acknowledgement: Parts of this research have been funded by a research project within the Australian
Research Council (ARC) Linkage Schema (grant code LP0669244) including financial support from SAP
and the Queensland Government. This research also received funding from the German Federal Ministry of
Economics and Technology (BMWi) under grant code 10MQ07024. The responsibility for the content of
this publication lies with the authors.