Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Without establishing and monitoring perfor-
mance measures, it is unlikely that the IT gov-
ernance will achieve its desired outcomes. The
performance measurement domain closes the loop
and provides feedback to the alignment domain
by providing evidence that the IT governance
initiative is on track and creating the opportunity
to take timely corrective measures. Beneficiaries
of IT resources sharing in virtualization processes
and in virtual organizations, although they are
temporal, exist on a long-term basis. Participating
companies find agreements, for example, on the
goals, on the internal rules of providing services
i.e. IaaS, SaaS, PaaS. All members have to agree
upon rules on how to allocate rules and tasks and
consequently on how to share profit and losses,
also for tax purposes in compliance with appli-
cable rules and regulations (Cevenini, 2002). As
a general principle, partners can regulate their
relationships by agreement, but agreements cannot
possibly cover each and every present and future
task and interactions. They may be renewed or
rewritten; otherwise the stability of rules would
be lost. For what is not specifically provided for
in the agreements, codes and law in force can be
applied. An agreement is an arrangement between
parties regarding a method of action. The goal of
this arrangement is to regulate the cooperation ac-
tions among partners and it is always associated
with a contract (Camarinha-Matos et al., 2005).
A contract is an agreement between two or
more competent parties in which an offer is made
and accepted and each party benefits. A contract
defines the duties, rights, and obligations of the
parties, remedy clauses as well as other clauses
that are important to characterize the goal of the
contract. In a maturing IT governance environ-
ment, service level agreements (SLAs) and their
supporting service level management (SLM)
process need to play an important role. The func-
tions of SLAs are:
•
To define what levels of service are accept-
able by users and attainable by the service
provider,
•
To define the mutually acceptable and
agreed-upon set of indicators of the quality
of service.
The SLM process includes defining an SLA
framework, establishing SLAs including level of
service and their corresponding metrics, monitor-
ing and reporting on the achieved services and
problems encountered, reviewing SLAs and
establishing improvement programs. The major
governance challenges are that the service levels
are to be expressed in business terms and the right
SLM/SLA process has to be put in place. The roles
most commonly given to SLAs can generally be
grouped into six areas:
•
Defining roles and accountability. In vir-
tual organizations a service provider in one
SLA can be the customer in another SLA
and vice versa. Service level agreements
will be used to re-establish the chain of
accountability.
•
Managing the customer's expectations re-
garding a product's delivery on three per-
formance levels (from the top): engineered
level, delivered level, guaranteed level.
•
Control implementation and execution, al-
though customers tend to use SLAs to en-
sure preferential treatment for their partic-
ular service requirements relative to all the
others in the service provider's network.
•
Providing verification on the customer
side. This is especially important to com-
panies that opt for higher levels of QoS.
•
Enabling communications for both service
providers and customers to address their
needs, expectations, performance relative
to those expectations and progress on ac-
tion items (Lee & Ben-Natan, 2001, Ruijs
& Schotanus, 2002, Scholz & Turowski,
2002).
