Service quality description — A business perspective

Business fields characterized by collective activities are numerous and require well-adapted software-based services to improve the efficiency of business collaborations. The design of services supporting the activities in such domains is usually ad-hoc and relies on the know-how of various involved actors. Based on our experience of designing innovative services for Architecture, Engineering and Construction projects, we proposed a service design method involving business actors, service and technical experts and being intrinsically collective. This article focuses more precisely on integrating non-functional (i.e. service quality) aspects of services in such an approach. The service-business practices alignment should not only be tackled from functional but as well non-functional perspective, so that not only business-level service quality requirements are clearly understood and taken care of, but as well that business practitioners get a clear view of all the characteristics of the designed service. While concepts referring to the technical service quality are well-known and vastly used by service experts, what are the concepts defining service quality in terms of specific business context remains an issue to be addressed both by domain practitioners and service experts. We propose in this article an initial business-level service quality model, aimed at qualifying services for construction projects.