Extended DEMO-based SLAs to specify customers' expectations

Abstract

Currently the services sector gained ground to the manufacturing industry to become one of the most profitable sector and with the greater growth curve. However, the organizations who have been leading the market have a lack of strong conceptual foundation which contributes to the gaps that reduce the services quality.Due to this increase of the gaps became more difficult for the service providers and their customers to align their expectations about the services quality. We propose to reduce the gaps by formally specifying the SLAs, using as foundation the Enterprise Ontology theory. This proposal is a new version of the DEMO-based SLAs with a more complex structure of Service Level Agreement (SLA). We evaluated the new proposal's version by gathering the feedback from experts in the area of SLAs specification. The feedbacks were rather positive since the interviewers agreed with the proposed SLA attributes. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.