Quality improvement and quantitative modeling — Using mashups for human error prevention

Modern IT service provider organizations are under a continuous pressure to increase their competitiveness. Ways to reduce costs while improving performance — in terms of effectiveness, productivity, and quality — of services are a key focus area for companies in the IT industry. The existence of human operators in this industry, although required, may introduce defects in the process. In IT service provider organizations, preventing human errors from affecting the system is critical because of the strict requirements for quality. Our work in this paper is inspired by Six Sigma and is based on partial automation and process redesign to prevent human errors from occurring, or at least to reduce their frequency. In particular, we analyze the usage of mashups as an effective approach to cope with errors introduced by human operators while performing their daily activities in the context of IT Service Management (ITSM).