Combination of Workflows and Service Level Agreements

  A service level agreement should describe the usage and management interactions between customer and provider. These interactions, e.g. problem management, can be formalized as processes. Processes like production or business processes are modeled with workflow concepts. Therefore, it is reasonable to use these proven concepts to specify service level agreements, too. We use workflow concepts in the design phase as well as for the actual contents of the service level agreement.

Modeled business processes must be understood by people not familiar with workflow concepts. The same is valid for SLA design. Users and several experts need to be involved in the specification of the technical and organizational parts of the SLA. Workflow models are easy to understand and therefore a good base for communication of people with different knowledge. Furthermore, the resulting workflow graphs are a part of the actual contents of service contracts to support the constructive cooperation in the operation phase.

Each process as well as each activity in a process can have quality criteria which must be guaranteed and therefore defined in the SLA. Thus the quality parameters form an integral part of our process model which is used to model the interactions between customer and provider as well as to write the SLA.