Many CIOs have taken great strides in creating service level agreements and deploying tools to measure service quality. A traditional QoS measure may not be the most effective means of evaluating IT services, however, because it is the user experience that matters most in the end, writes Hank Marquis, practice leader for Business Service Management at Global Knowledge.

QoS ensures that a product's characteristics are delivered as promised, Marquis writes in a column at CIOUpdate. IT services are different from products, however, and their quality depends on the user experience. For example, measuring the status of technical operations, such as response times or page loads, may provide a QoS assessment, but it does not assess the quality of the experience.

"While you can make sure a product meets quantitative criteria before it's consumed, a service is produced and consumed simultaneously," Marquis writes. "Therefore all you can do inside the provider is prepare for its production, and all your internal measurements are nothing more than predictions of what you think the customer QoE will be."

To measure quality of experience, you have to look at satisfaction from the customer's viewpoint, Marquis advises. It is a qualitative measurement, and it requires assessment of multiple dimensions of the service as perceived by the customer.

For more:
- see Hank Marquis' column at CIOUpdate

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