In the field of IT, the markets, business activities, needs and requirements of internal and external service providers and customers are changing in ever-shortening cycles. This forces companies to increase their organizational flexibility not only as far as their structure is concerned but also with regard to established business processes. This is partly achieved by reducing the added value ratio and partly by integrating partners more and more into processes associated with the delivery of products and services. To do this however, companies have to develop the necessary competencies to manage the various partners and procedures, as well as establish processes to ensure high quality services.

Customer expectations and demands regarding high-quality products and services have also risen. As far as the customer is concerned, studies show that the performance and quality of IT services are much more important than the prices of the services themselves. More in-depth market studies prove that poor services result in damages for companies amounting to several billion Euros.

IT services are especially becoming a more and more important module in commercial value adding. Many business processes would be unable to function without the corresponding IT services. Supplementary technological innovations such as service-orientated architectures, web services and cloud computing will make future IT structures very different to those of today. They will no longer be made up of monolithic systems and applications but rather of separate modular service components.

These developments and the experience we have gained from numerous consulting and research projects prompted us to deal with the subject of IT service quality management in more detail. Up until now, the topic has hardly been researched.

The aim of the book is to reduce this knowledge gap and to encourage people to spend more time researching the numerous facets of this fascinating subject in the future. To present the relevant aspects of IT service quality management in a structured way, we have divided the book into 6 sections with a total of 16 chapters.

The first section of the book introduces the subject of quality management for IT services and presents general concepts and a review of the current state of research.

In the first chapter, the contribution submitted by Spath, Bauer and Praeg outlines the topic of IT service quality management and describes fundamental concepts, models and definitions both for IT service and quality management. A lifecycle model for IT services is presented and also a model for classifying quality management methods into the phases of the IT lifecycle. The last part of the article illustrates the various effects of IT service quality management on company performance.

The contribution written by Barrutia und Gilsanz describes the current state of electronic services in the form of a literature review. Ideas for future research work in the field of e-service quality management are presented based on current research results.