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Annotation Make your SLA work for you _ Read this essential guide to SLAs today!

A wide range of industry sectors will outsource service provision (for example, banking, pharmaceuticals, and insurance companies). This can happen where an organisation outsources its IT payroll needs, its helpdesk and IT maintenance requirements, its payment processing, or its whole IT function.



The key risk

The key risk for an organisation that enters into an outsourcing transaction, are that the services that it receives from the supplier will be worse than the services they were receiving before, or that the cost savings that were anticipated or promised, are not achieved.



The SLA

To try and avoid this scenario, the outsourcing contract should include a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The SLA must be drafted to govern the standard of service that you require, including the cost of those services and the consequences of not achieving pre-agreed standards.





The wider environment

While Service Level Agreements are a key method, within ITIL, for setting out how two parties have agreed that a specific service (usually, but not necessarily, IT-related) will be delivered by one to the other, and the standards or levels to which it will be delivered, the basic concept is now far more widely applied than just in ITIL® and ITSM environments.



This pocket guide provides information and guidance on SLAs to those in the wider environment, from a legal and practical view point.



The benefits and the pitfalls

Identifying some of the benefits and the pitfalls that an organisation can encounter when negotiating and drafting SLAs, this pocket guide provides an overview of SLAs, highlighting typical scenarios that can arise, and provides information on typical solutions that have been adopted by other organisations.



Read this pocket guide to _



* Understand what an SLA is and why you need one
When negotiating any type of service-related deal (including any IT outsourcing deal), it is essential that sufficient time is devoted to ensuring that the service is of sufficient quality and that this is recorded in an SLA.
* Understand where SLAs go wrong.
SLAs can go wrong for a number of reasons. For example, the SLA may not reflect reality, your service requirements may not be defined properly, or there may be too many service levels and service level targets which can then become difficult to manage.
* Learn how to build foundations for the SLA.
There are elements that you should be considering well before even engaging with potential suppliers. This pocket guide details what your organisation should consider, in order to find the proposal which most closely matches its needs.
* Understand the issues to consider when drafting the SLA.
This pocket guide covers the issues to consider when drafting an SLA, as there are certain provisions in SLAs which either should, or should not, appear.



By reading this a short, legal and practical guide to SLAs, you should be able to quickly come up to speed with some of the legal and practical issues that might arise. Negotiating the SLA and putting the SLA into action are also discussed in the pocket guide. Whilst short and easy to digest, case references and weblinks have been provided in the text so readers can find out more information about SLAs.

Despite extensive deliberations in contemporary literature, the design of citizen-centric e-government websites remains an unresolved theoretical and pragmatic conundrum. Operationalizing e-government service quality to investigate and improve the design of e-government websites has been a much sought-after objective. Yet, there is a lack of actionable guidance on how to develop e-government websites that exhibit high levels of service quality. Drawing from marketing literature, we undertake a goal approach to this problem by delineating e-government service quality into aspects of IT-mediated service content and service delivery. Whereas service content describes the functions available on an e-government website that assist citizens in completing their transactional goals, service delivery defines the manner by which these functions are made accessible via the web interface as a delivery channel. We construct and empirically test a research model that depicts a comprehensive collection of web-enabled service content functions and delivery dimensions desirable by citizens. Empirical findings from an online survey of 647 respondents attest to the value of distinguishing between service content functions and delivery dimensions in designing e-government websites. Both service content and delivery are found to be significant contributors to achieving e-government service quality. These IT-mediated service content functions and delivery dimensions represent core areas of e-government website design where the application of technology makes a difference, especially when considered in tandem with the type of transactional activity. A split sample analysis of the data further demonstrates our model's robustness when applied to e-government transactions of vary ing frequency.

The second half of the 20th century saw the development of a new trend in the management of medical services across Europe. Those shifts were associated with the transformation of various spheres of human life, both on professional and private levels. The service market then turned back to “quality”, already known in antiquity. According to Aristotle, “quality” is one of the basic categories of thought and reality of the human population. The research material was obtained from literature databases, including Scopus, Cochrane, Medline, and PubMed, as well as from literature reports, including monographs, research papers (e.g., doctoral dissertations), and others. The available literature was assessed with regards to the abovementioned objectives of our study and considering possible advantages from its implementation. Therefore, the applied research method was based on a bibliographic query and desktop data analysis. The adopted research methodology hinged on exploration, compilation, analysis, and processing of data and information from available sources, resulting in drawing up of summary conclusions. The obtained data were subjected to reciprocal confrontation with an attempt to evaluate new possibilities of using the method in other medical specialties. The Servqual method enables us to learn the patient’s expectations, while the service provider can identify irregularities and implement corrections. It allows the executive staff of medical facilities to change elements of medical procedures, which improves the quality of the service provided and thus increases the satisfaction and compliance of patients.

Networks are now embedded in daily life thanks to smaller, faster, inexpensive components that are more powerful and increasingly connected. Parallel to this quantitative explosion of communication networks, technology has become more complex. This development comes with challenges related to management and control, and it has become necessary to manage the service level demands of the client to which the service provider commits. Different approaches to managing one or more service level components in different emerging environments are explored, such as: the Internet of Things, the Cloud, smart grids, e-health, mesh networking, D2D (Device to Device), smart cities and even green networking. This book therefore allows for a better understanding of the important challenges and issues relating to Quality of Service (QoS) management, security and mobility in these types of environment.

PurposeTechnology acceptance, especially internet banking adoption, has become a vital issue in the business world today. The potential of this technology is enormous. The purpose of this study is to ascertain determinants of internet banking adoption using unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and electronic service (e-service) quality, which accounts for changes in user’s intention to adopt internet banking.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected data from customers of commercial banks using structured questionnaires. The data were collected in four weeks in the beginning of September 2017. A two-stage approach of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used for data analysis.FindingsThe results reveal that integrated UTAUT model had significant influence on user intention to adopt internet banking. Findings of the SEM indicated that approximately 80 per cent of the variance in user intention to adopt internet banking was accounted by predictors. The study schematized that assurance is the most influential factor among all other technology and service quality factors. Additionally, performance expectancy and effort expectancy were found to be positive and significant mediator variables among website design, customer service and customer’s intention to adopt internet banking.Practical implicationsIt is recommended that both website designers and managers should focus on technology and service quality factors to boost the confidence of internet banking users. Importance performance matrix analysis suggested that managers should provide assurance to internet banking users, so that they could maintain a long-term relationship with internet banking services. The study calls researchers to test the integrated UTAUT model in other electronic commerce (e-commerce) domains such as online booking or online shopping websites.Originality/valueTo the best of author’s knowledge, this study is the first that extend the UTAUT model with four e-service quality dimensions, namely, website design, customer service, assurance and reliability to investigate user’s intention to adopt internet banking in developing country context of Pakistan. More importantly, the mediating role of performance expectancy and effort expectancy is examined first time within integrated UTAUT model. Furthermore, the integration of UTAUT model contributes to the advancement of internet banking acceptance and offers useful insights to researchers and policy-makers on how to enhance internet banking acceptance among customers of commercial banks.

Purpose This study aims to present a systematic review on service quality in higher education. It discusses about the latest opportunities and challenges facing higher educational institutions (HEIs) following the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Design/methodology/approach The study relied on the grounded theory’s inductive reasoning to capture, analyze and synthesize the findings from academic and non-academic sources. The methodology involved a systematic review from Scopus-indexed journals, from intergovernmental and non-governmental policy documents, as well as from university ranking sites and league tables. Findings The comprehensive review suggests that HEIs can use different performance indicators and metrics to evaluate their service quality in terms of their resources, student-centered education, high-impact research and stakeholder engagement. Moreover, this paper sheds light about the impact of an unprecedented COVID-19 on higher education services. Practical implications During the first wave of COVID-19, the delivery of higher educational services migrated from traditional and blended learning approaches to fully virtual and remote course delivery. In the second wave, policy makers imposed a number of preventative measures, including social distancing and hygienic practices, among others, on HEIs. Originality/value This timely contribution has synthesized the findings on service quality and performance management in the higher education context. Furthermore, it investigated the effect of COVID-19 on higher education services. It deliberates on the challenges and responses in the short/medium term and provides a discussion on the way forward. In conclusion, it implies that HEI leaders ought to embrace online teaching models and virtual systems, as they are here to stay in a post-COVID-19 era.

\"This book contains a simple but powerful definition of services, based on a separation between back-stage and front-stage activities. Services deal with front-stage interactions, production, and manufacturing with back-stage operations. Teboul uses this distinction systematically to explore the important issues of the field within a coherent set of concepts and maps, including the service mix, the service triangle, and the service-intensity matrix. This is a novel approach to services that challenges the traditional view.\"--Jacket.

PurposeAlthough comprehensive work has been conducted in several scholarly journals in electronic service quality (e-SQ) measurement, there has been no cross-functional review of these studies. The majority of the review studies focus on e-SQ assessment in the field of electronic retail. This paper explores and synthesizes e-SQ evaluation work across the various functional domains in the last two decades and maps critical methodological challenges. It further classifies the dimensions used by researchers in six broad categories for better comprehension.Design/methodology/approachTo analyze and appreciate past e-SQ measurement research, a content assessment of the 50 most relevant research papers from various functional domains drawn from prestigious repositories was undertaken.FindingsThe results indicate shortcomings noticed in methodological issues in the e-SQ measurement research like research approaches, data analysis procedures, sampling methods, generation and purification of items, validity and reliability assessment, and dimensionality analysis. It further reveals that though e-SQ is multi-dimensional and context-specific, dimensions like content/information quality, website design, ease of use/usability, efficiency, security/and privacy, responsiveness, reliability, customer service, trust and fulfillment have been consistently cited in the reviewed studies across the various functional domains.Originality/valueAn assessment of 50 publications over the past 2 decades identifies key areas of concern in the existing research on e-SQ measurement in various functional domains for scholars and professionals. This study also provides a unique categorization of e-SQ dimensions used in various functional domains and has the potential to guide future research.