The Panorama of Information Systems Quality

Abstract

Business organizations are still struggling to improve the quality of information systems (IS) after many research efforts and years of accumulated experience in delivering them. The IS community is not short on prescriptions for improving quality; however the utterances are somewhat cacophonous as proponents of quality-enhancing approaches hyperbolize claims of their efficacy and/or denigrate older approaches, often ignoring the importance of context. In this chapter we undertake an extensive review of the IS quality literature to balance the many perspectives of stakeholders in this heterogeneous community with the necessarily varied prescriptions for producing high-quality systems. We develop an IS quality model, which distills determinants of IS product quality into effects attributable to people, processes, and practices and denote that IS success results from the combination of discernible IS quality and stakeholders’ perceptions of IS quality. This chapter serves as a general introduction to the detailed analyses of topics that follow in subsequent chapters but also provides insights that are not covered elsewhere in the book.