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An integrated framework of HoQ and AHP for the QOE improvement of network-based ASP services

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Abstract

The application service provider (ASP) industry provides an essential infrastructure for Internet-based e-business transactions. First, we introduce the House of Quality (HoQ) framework, which provides the best way to not only arrange and evaluate voice of customers (VoC) and voice of engineers (VoE) but also combine VoC and VoE, thereby presenting explicit directions for quality of experience (QoE) enhancement. However, there have been few studies on HoQ for developing and improving telecom services. Here, we employ the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method to evaluate VoC, VoE, and their relationships so that qualitative measurement, which is the weakest point of the traditional HoQ approach, can be substituted by quantitative and interactive estimation. The case study discussed here serves as an illustration of the applicability and usefulness of the integrated HoQ/AHP approach to the ASP industry. The proposed integrated framework successfully finds key functional elements, such as business customization and security/failure management, to reengineer the service delivery process, thereby helping service providers develop better ASP services to improve QoE effectively and efficiently.

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Notes

  1. Since VoC is an equivalent concept of quality of experience (QoE), those two terms are interchangeable. However, according to the convention in quality management, VoC will be used mainly in this article.

  2. The major modification is as follows. We added one layer, the management layer, on top of the application layer in order to explicitly incorporate the service management function. Due to this change, a minor rearrangement of some detailed features in the generic version of Sun Microsystems, Inc. was necessary. This modification was conducted through a literature survey and consultation with experts (refer Section 4.1). The final outcome led us to the resulting key functional elements.

  3. The original version of the SERVQUAL model assumes that a service experience consists of multiple dimensions such as reliability, responsiveness, assurance, visibility (or tangibles), and empathy. Thus, based on the SERVQUAL model, the level of QoS in each dimension is defined by the gap score between the customer's expectation and his/her perception. For this reason, SERVQUAL is also called a gap model.

  4. For example, it is typically assumed that different experts have the same information on the subject and the same capability for evaluation. If this assumption seems unrealistic, one may assume there is no prior method of distinguishing the evaluative capabilities of different surveyors, which eventually leads to the assignment of the same weight to each surveyor.

  5. [29, 31] provide other ways for combining survey outcomes. However, it is asserted in [29] that different methods for combining pairwise-comparison matrices result in hardly any difference.

  6. This fact also implies that the architecture suggested in Section 2.2 is well-defined.

  7. The most recent term for this generalization could be SaaS (Software as a Service). Since it is not easy to define a label such as SaaS, in this paper, we restrict ourselves to a rather classical definition of ASP services.

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  1. College of Business Administration, Kyung Hee University, Hoegi-dong 1, Dongdaemoon-gu, Seoul, 130-701, South Korea

    Dohoon Kim

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Kim, D. An integrated framework of HoQ and AHP for the QOE improvement of network-based ASP services. Ann. Telecommun. 65, 19–29 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-009-0143-9

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