The Application of Six Sigma to Promote Information System Service Quality

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of the Internet, Information System (IS) has become increasingly more profitable. The quality of the IS services should be confirmed prior to deploying it to the web site, resulting in customers that keep coming back. Therefore, this paper presents a framework that integrates Six Sigma Concept to improve the IS service process. The application in the selected company is a multi-tier framework system and there are 1,022 client sites distributed in Taiwan area, one broker server site and three application server sites, which concurrently access and store data from a center database server. When delivering application to the Intranet, users dissatisfaction was at an all time high. We applied the Six Sigma quality cycle: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control (DMAIC) to resolve this problem. We plotted user complaints against response time (define), drew up a test plan and executed the load testing (measure), collected testing data from different client sites for analysis (analyze), found where the bottleneck was and fixed it (improve) and monitored the status to satisfy users' requirement (control).