10. The Role of Service Quality in Transforming Operations

The introduction of any tool requires changes in the users’ environment to use the tool. McAfee (Harv Bus Rev November: 141–149, 2006) highlights this point by stating that the challenges in IT projects are not just technical but managerial. Here, managerial refers to embedding the system within the organisation. Kotter says ‘in the final analysis, change sticks when “it becomes the way we do things here”, when it seeps into the bloodstream of the corporate body’ (Kotter, Harv Bus Rev January: 96–103, 2007). Clearly, the success of any IT transformation programme is in part a function of the quality of service being provided by the system. BT not only is a consumer of service and field automation technologies but also provides production management solutions to other industries. We have observed (both qualitatively and quantitatively) from our experiences of developing production management systems that the quality of the services being provided by production management systems is dependent on the perceptions of the users of the system. This correlates with the measures put in place for engagement between the development team and the end users during the life cycle of the development.