Re-presenting the Literature Review: A Rich Picture of Service Quality Research in Information Systems

This paper offers an alternative method for conceptualising and presenting an information systems literature review, based on Checkland’s Soft Systems Method (SSM). We apply this approach to service quality research in the Information Systems (IS) field. Despite a large volume of existing literature, the number of new articles published in this area continues to increase, without achieving a consensus on a set of generalisable and predictive dimensions of service quality in the information systems context. We perform a CATWOE analysis and develop a rich picture of the development and current status of service quality research in information systems. We find this alternative conceptualisation of the literature review offers fresh insights. We suggest that the potential of service quality research to enact meaningful transformations in the information systems area, plus the active sponsorship of the “owners” of the research explains its continuing popularity, despite weak predictive power.