Service Contracts Based on Workflow Modeling

Abstract

The increasing importance of IT infrastructures and the complexity of IT services in each company often results in endeavors to outsource IT services. This implies meeting the challenge of service quality. Therefore, it is important to sign a service contract for the outsourcing partnership supporting effective usage and management of the service. It must be possible to monitor and manage the service in a constructive and fast manner. This paper presents a customer-oriented approach for specifying service contracts. The idea is to combine service contracts with workflow concepts. The knowledge about design and management of workflows can be used to specify a service contract constructively supporting operation and usage of complex services. The use of the customer's business processes as a basis for the contract ensures a customer-oriented service view. Workflow concepts allow both, specifying non-ambiguous contracts and constructive instructions for usage and management of services by the customer. Combined with a suitable contract structure a controlled dynamics for the service contract is possible.