Conclusion and Future Work

  This paper proposes the application of workflow concepts for the specification of SLAs concerning IT services. The main points of the approach discussed are that it supports the identified requirements for long-term service level agreements which need to be customer-centric and constructive. Supplementary, this approach generates some additional advantages, like the explicit statement of resources, interfaces, competence and information flows supporting automation efforts and optimization of resource consumption. The most attractive benefit of the workflow concepts is the active support of cooperation for usage and operation resulting from the instructive nature of workflows.

The approach is currently verified in an industry cooperation with a major provider of telecommunication services. The necessary effort sets the main focus especially to extensive, custom designed services. But we are researching ways to simplify the reuse of this effort.

Further research is concerned with designing an application methodology and a methodology for extraction of characteristic capacity and quality parameters. The target is the systematic derivation of customer-oriented but measurable quality parameters.