The Development of IT Service Quality Standards in China

The process of developing IT-based standards has recently being labeled “a critical research frontier for IS research”. Within the last half-dozen years, IS scholars have begun to examine a variety of domains in which standards-setting occurred. Many of these studies have focused on international telecommunications standards in Asia. Despite the number and diversity of the many empirical studies, most have focused on technical standards for ICT interoperability. We consider the creation and dissemination of a distinct type of standard, known as “IT service management standards”, which are a type of process standards specific to IT vendors. To our knowledge, the subject of establishing service measurement standards has not been considered in the IS literature. We review the growing literature on standards-setting and standards-adoption, and we inquire whether the issues that consistently accompany the development process for technical standards for IT and telecommunications interoperability will generalize to the process of developing IT service measurement standards. We describe a case study of the development of standards for measuring IT services in China. Rather than analyzing our data according to a specific theory, we compare the results to date of China’s creation of IT service standards to the phenomena frequently observed in prior IS studies of standards-setting. We argue that several recurring phenomena that accompany prior standards-setting initiatives in the IS literature (i.e., conflict among parties, warring factions, etc.) are lacking in our study. We speculate about the reasons why conflict is absent and develop proposition that can be evaluated with future case data.