![](bg7.png)
of data mining with real data from organizations,
especially concerning what are the best services for
an organization, which bring more value and which
do not.
The second live evaluation occurred in Lisbon in
a workshop held with students and professors from
the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).
There were 30 people attending. The audience was
characterized by being students of a Fast Track
Executive MS Information Systems in VCU.
This feedback collected was mostly related to the
importance of the topic, the relevance of the research
problem and motivation to keep pursuing the
mitigation of gap number four of service quality.
The third evaluation was made in a DEMO
Workshop, held in Lisbon, with a representative of
the Switzerland DEMO Community.
With this workshop we collected important
feedback that allowed us answer the Österle
principles. This feedback was especially concerned
about the connection between our proposed system,
the DEMO Engine, and the DEMO Processor.
As a final evaluation with academics we
interviewed a Portuguese academic that has access
to the DEMO Processor and could provide us with
important and concise feedback over the two
systems.
The most positive feedback we receive was
regarding the Management of Service Promises:
Service Standardization. According to him, our
proposal makes use of the EO patterns and that
reduces the communication mismatch in service
delivery. Also the Management of Customer
Expectations was considered as a major impact of
the DEMO Engine, especially because of the
DEMO-based SLA, Act visibility and clarification
of who participates in the service execution. The
factor that least improved with DEMO Engine was
the Service Intangibility: Service Perception. This
was mostly due to the lack of service context in the
system.
To conclude the evaluation we present how the
Four Principles from (Österle et al., 2011) were
accomplished in our research. The Abstraction
because the artifact we propose can be applied to all
types of services, ontological, infological or
datalogical. The Originality because the combine
usage of DEMO and SLA to tackle service quality
gaps was used in recent researches (Mendes, 2013)
but not to the gap number four. Also, using EO
patterns and oblige customers to explicit every
coordination act they make is a novel approach to
service management. The Justification because the
artifact is justified by all the evaluations and
feedback we gathered. Benefit because the DEMO
Engine artifact provides a way to reduce the
difference between the service delivery and the
communication involving that delivery, therefore
increasing the service quality.
7 CONCLUSIONS
The service sector is the largest economy sector and
is the driver for value creation in modern
organizations. With so many new services being
created quality becomes a distinct factor between
them. However quality in services is difficult to
measure and control. Nevertheless, it was created a
model to better understand the challenges services
faced. This model decomposed service quality in
five gaps. The gaps model was the first step towards
determining how to achieve quality services.
This research is focused on reducing the
difference between the expectations and perceptions
of customers when requesting services. We take off
from work done tackling other service quality gaps
(Ferreira, 2010; Almeida, 2012; Mendes, 2013) and
focus on the difference between the service delivery
and the communication of that delivery.
We intended to evaluate the impact of using the
communication patterns of EO to close this gap. For
that purpose, we developed a system that enables
transparency, readiness and easiness in
communication between the customer and the
service provider. We intend with this system address
the communication challenges of gap 4: Service
Intangibility, Management of Service Promises,
Management of Customers Expectations, Customer
Education and Internal Marketing Communications.
This research was done using DSRM. We
developed an artifact (the DEMO Engine) using a
software prototype that enables an overall better
service exchange between the customer and the
provider, and enabling co-creation. In order to
specify the contract of each service, we use SLA
knowledge (Mendes and Mira da Silva, 2012) and
service specification (Terlouw and Albani, 2011).
To better demonstrate the functionalities and
capabilities of the DEMO Engine, we demonstrated
the system using a fictional example of a service
request to a Travel Agency. The evaluation of this
research was done by applying the Österle principles
and gathering feedback from academics.
The first major contribution that this work
intends to pursue is the creation of an engine that
can enable an organization to have its Information
System based on DEMO, managing services with
DEMOEngine
451