Using DEMO-based SLAs for Improving City Council Services
Carlos Mendes
1
, Mário Almeida
1
, Nuno Salvador
2
and Miguel Mira da Silva
1
1
Instituto Superior Técnico, Avenida Rovisco Pais, Lisboa, Portugal
2
Câmara Municipal de Pombal, Pombal, Portugal
Keywords: Service Catalogue, Service Level Agreements, Demo, Enterprise Ontology.
Abstract: According to data from the Portuguese Association of City Councils (DGAL – Portuguese abbreviation) the
308 city councils in Portugal employ about 135 000 people and spend about 3.8 billion euros a year
(Ministry of Finance and Public Administration, 2010). In this paper we describe the implementation of our
most recent proposal to specify the services quality in the city council of Pombal (CMP) in Portugal. This
proposal is a new version of the DEMO-based SLAs with a more complex structure of Service Level
Agreement (SLA) attributes. This proposal is based on the Enterprise Ontology theory and identifies
services that do not create new original results, therefore services with great potential to be automated. We
evaluated the new proposal’s version by collecting feedback from CMP employees and customers.
Moreover, we found some possible improvements that could save millions of euros to the Portuguese state.
1 INTRODUCTION
In previous research we focused on closing the gap
between customers’ expectations and the perceived
service (Parasuraman et al., 1985) by formally
specifying the customers’ expectations into Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) (Mendes et al., 2012)
(Mendes et al., 2011) (Mendes and Mira da Silva,
2012), using as a foundation the DEMO
methodology and respective Enterprise Ontology
theory (Dietz, 2006).
DEMO (Design & Engineering Methodology for
Organizations) is a methodology for modelling,
(re)designing and (re)engineering organizations and
networks of organizations. The theory that underlies
this methodology is called Enterprise Ontology (EO)
that by itself is based on the speech act theory. We
have chosen EO because this theory can help us
expand the expressiveness of the service
descriptions and, consequently, allow a better
alignment between expectations and perceptions
(Mendes and Mira da Silva, 2012).
In this paper we propose a new version of the
DEMO-based Service Level Agreement (SLA)
(Mendes and Mira da Silva, 2012) that has a new
structure with more attributes and results from a
deeper state of art analysis. We applied this proposal
in the Portuguese city council of Pombal (CMP -
Portuguese abbreviation), i.e. we specified the
service catalogue of CMP including the services
CMP provides to Pombal residents and the SLAs
they use to comply with the residents’ expectations.
To evaluate the new SLA version we collected
feedback from 23 employees of CMP and 7
customers. The majority of the proposal attributes
(14 in 16) was classified as important since they
received a minimum score of 7.6 in 10 while the
remaining two received an score of 5.9. Besides
these findings, as our proposal identifies services
that do not create new original results, we also
identified services with great potential to be
automated. We present an example of a possible
improvement that could save millions of euros to the
Portuguese state.
Our study was conducted using the Design
Science Research Methodology (DSRM) that aims
at creating and evaluating IT artefacts intended to
solve identified organizational problems (Hevner et
al., 2004). These artefacts include constructs
(vocabulary and symbols), models (abstractions and
representations), methods (algorithms and practices)
and
instantiations (implemented and prototype
systems). This research method comprises the
following phases (Peffers, 2008): problem
identification, objectives definition, design and
development, demonstration, evaluation and
communication.
The paper is structured as follows. We will start
431
Mendes C., Almeida M., Salvador N. and Mira da Silva M..
Using DEMO-based SLAs for Improving City Council Services.
DOI: 10.5220/0004110404310440
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (SSEO-2012), pages 431-440
ISBN: 978-989-8565-30-3
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
by providing a brief overview of the literature on the
problem area (Section 2). In Section 3, we introduce
the theoretical background of this research, the
Enterprise Ontology theory. Afterwards, we
introduce the new version of the DEMO-based
solution to specify the services quality (Section 4).
In Section 5, we describe an experiment at CMP. In
Section 6, we explain the evaluation process, which
uses data from the experiment, and specify the
lessons learned. Finally, we present our conclusions
(Section 7).
This section corresponds to the problem
identification and motivation phase of DSRM. It
also corresponds to the objectives definition phase.
2 RELATED WORK
This section describes the current solutions for
specifying services quality and explains why these
solutions do not solve the gaps problem
(Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1985).
We analysed several solutions to specify the
Service Quality: Service Level Management best
practices, web services based solutions and the
Generic Service Specification Framework (GSSF).
In spite of the different backgrounds, all contributed
to the service quality specification. The first solution
is proposed by many best practices frameworks,
such as ITIL (Office of Government Commerce,
2007) or CMMI (CMMI for Services, Version 1.3,
2010), the second represents the solutions focused
on web services and the third is an Enterprise
Ontology-based approach (even though the main
goal of the GSSF was to specify the services and not
the service quality itself, this framework also
contributed to the problem area).
Service Level Management is one of the key
processes by which organizations manage their
services, because it acts as the interface between the
customer and the provider. At its most basic level,
Service Level Management is involved in the
following activities: define, agree, record and
manage levels of service. There are a number of key
elements required to ensure that services are fit for
purpose and use, and remain so throughout their
lifetime: service level requirements, targets and
agreements (Office of Government Commerce,
2007).
Basically, to understand the Service Level
Requirements (SLR) means that the customers’
needs and wants are understood, i.e. an SLR is a
customer requirement for an aspect of a service.
SLRs are based on business objectives and are used
to negotiate Service Level Targets (SLT) which are
commitments documented in Service Level
Agreements (SLAs). SLTs are based on SLRs and
are needed to ensure that the service is fit for
purpose. SLTs should be SMART: specific,
measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Finally,
SLA is an agreement between a provider and a
customer that describes the service; it documents the
SLTs and specifies the responsibilities of the
provider and customer. Over the years it has also
been the chosen concept to specify services quality
(Office of Government Commerce, 2007).
Regarding Service Level Management solutions,
current approaches have two main flaws. First, they
lack a strong conceptual foundation because they
were derived from best practices of several years of
implementations - not from a well-founded theory.
Consequently, the inexistence of a theory may cause
incoherencies among those solutions (second flaw).
Service Level Management solutions are process-
driven and not service-driven. These solutions are
designed to work individually as processes but the
interactions between these processes (such as
Request Fulfilment, Service Level Management and
Incident Management) are usually unclear. For
instance, the connection between an incident and an
SLA is neither clearly explained in ITIL nor in
CMMI.
There are some solutions to specify the services
quality that originated in the web services
community. In (Sahai, Durante, & Machiraju, 2002)
the authors show how to use Web Service
Description Language (WSDL) and Web Service
Flow Language (WSFL) to specify SLAs. However,
this work suffers from the web vision tunnel as it is
focused on the web services and does not try to
specify business services. For instance, the
specifications do not include penalties or prices. The
researches in (Tosic, Patel, & Pagurek, 2002),
(Dobson, 2004) and (Frolund & Koistinen, 1998)
have the same bottleneck. Despite this trend in the
web service community, there are some recent
researches that try to overcome the mentioned web
service tunnel vision. In (Keller & Ludwig, 2003) a
novel framework for specifying and monitoring
SLAs for Web Services is introduced: the Web
Service Level Agreement (WSLA) framework. This
framework is applicable to any inter-domain
management scenario such as business process and
service management or the management of
networks, systems and applications in general. In
(Andrieux, et al., 2007) and (Liu, Ngu, & Zeng,
2004) business criteria is also included in SLAs.
These three solutions represent a new movement in
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the web service community; however, none is based
on a strong conceptual foundation.
Another contribution to the gaps problem is the
Generic Service Specification Framework (GSFF)
(Terlouw & Albani, 2011), which is based on the
following generic service definition (Albani,
Terlouw, Hardjosumarto, & Dietz, 2009): a service
is a universal pattern of coordination and
production acts, performed by the executor of a
transaction for the benefit of its initiator, in the
order stated in the standard pattern of a transaction.
We adopted this service definition in our
research since this definition is the only one that, as
our research, uses DEMO as a conceptual
foundation.
The GSSF defines four main areas of concern for
each service: the service executor, the service
production, the service coordination and the service
contract option. The first one defines who the
provider of the service is. The second focuses on the
production act to be performed by the executor. The
third gives the consumer all the information required
for conducting a successful communication with the
provider. And finally, the service contract option
specifies one or several contract options from which
service consumers can choose.
Even though the quality aspects are very basic,
the Generic Service Specification Framework
represents a large contribution to the service
specification research area. However, the level of
service quality specification is not always sufficient,
because sometimes customers and providers have
different expectations due to a lack of specification
(Terlouw & Albani, 2011).
3 THEORETICAL FOUNDATION
This section briefly describes the Enterprise
Ontology theory (the theory that supports our
proposal).
Enterprise Ontology (Dietz, 2006) is based on
four axioms – operation, transaction, composition
and distinction – and the organization theorem. The
operation axiom states that the operation of an
enterprise is constituted by the activities of actor
roles that are elementary chunks of authority and
responsibility, fulfilled by subjects. In doing so,
these subjects perform two kinds of acts:
production acts and coordination acts. These acts
have definite results: production facts and
coordination facts, respectively. By performing
production acts (P-acts) the subjects contribute to
bringing about the goods and/or services that are
delivered to the environment of the enterprise. By
performing coordination acts (C-acts) subjects enter
into, and comply with, commitments towards each
other regarding the performance of production acts.
The transaction axiom states that coordination
acts are performed as steps in universal patterns.
These patterns, also called transactions, always
involve two actor roles (initiator and executer) and
are aimed at achieving a particular result. A
transaction develops in three phases: the order phase
(O-phase), the execution phase (E-phase), and the
result phase (R-phase). In the O-phase the two actors
agree on the expected result of the transaction; in the
E-phase the executer executes the production act
needed to create the expected result; and in the R-
phase the two actors discuss if the transaction result
is equal to the expected result.
The composition axiom establishes the
relationships between transactions. This axiom states
that every transaction is either a) enclosed in another
transaction, b) is a customer transaction of another
transaction, or c) is a self-activation transaction. The
latter case refers to transactions that give rise to
further transactions of the same type.
The distinction axiom states that there are three
distinct human abilities playing a role in the
operation of actors, called performa, informa, and
forma. An ontological act (performa) is an act in
which new original things are brought about.
Deciding and judging are typical ontological
production acts. Regarding the coordination between
people, typical ontological acts are requesting and
promising. An infological production act is an act in
which one is not concerned about the form but,
instead, about the content of the information.
Typical infological acts are inquiring, calculating,
and reasoning. Regarding the coordination between
people, formulating thoughts (in written or spoken
sentences) and interpreting perceived (through
listening or reading) sentences are typical infological
coordination acts. Acts like copying, storing, and
transmitting data are typical datalogical acts, while
speaking, listening, writing, and reading are typical
datalogical coordination acts.
4 PROPOSAL
This section corresponds to the design and
development step of DSRM. Our proposal is
composed by the following steps:
1. Identify the services;
2. Specify the executor, production and
coordination of the services;
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3. Specify the SLAs for each identified
transaction/service.
The first step is to identify the services of the
provider, using for that purpose a process based on
the methodology proposed in (Dietz, 2006). This
process is composed by six steps: Enterprise
Description, Performa-Informa-Forma Analysis,
Coordination-Actors-Production Analysis,
Transaction Pattern Synthesis, Result Structure
Analysis and Actor Transaction Diagram/Service
Identification.
The second step of the proposal is to apply part
of the GSSF (Terlouw & Albani, 2011): service
executor, service production and service
coordination. The service executor area defines who
the provider of the service is; the service production
area focuses on the production act to be performed
by the executor; and the service coordination area
gives the consumer all the information required for
conducting a successful communication with the
provider.
The fourth area, the contract options, is replaced
by our definition of SLA presented in Figure . That
means for each identified service, one should specify
the list of associated SLAs using our SLA definition
(step three).
Figure 1: Structure and attributes of the DEMO-based
SLA.
Our SLA proposal considers four main areas of
concern with their respective attributes that we will
now explain. The first section is called Generic
SLA Information and it defines the name of the
SLA (SLA Name) and the SLA purpose (SLA
Description). Additionally, the Generic SLA
Information describes who owns this SLA (SLA
Owner), it also provides a contact of this person
(SLA Owner Contact Information) and, finally, this
section defines the name of the service that the SLA
applies to (SLA Service).
The second considered section contains
information concerning the dates of the SLA and is
called Temporal SLA Information. In this section
the date on which the SLA was established (SLA
Creation Date) is defined as well as the time interval
on which the SLA is valid (SLA Validity Period), the
information related to the SLA modification dates by
the customer (SLA Version Control Information) and
the information concerning the SLA review dates
performed by an entity related to the service
provider (SLA Review Period Information).
Next, we define a section called Responsibility
SLA Information that regards the information
about the responsibilities of each actor in the
execution of this SLA. In this section two attributes
are specified concerning the obligations and duties
of the customer (SLA Customer Responsibilities) and
the service provider (SLA Provider Responsibilities).
Finally, the last section is called Specific SLA
Information and for each type of SLA (SLA Type) it
specifies six different types of targets (SLA Targets),
which can give rise to actions if they are not fulfilled
(SLA Penalties), but if they are fulfilled, this should
be rewarded (SLA Bonuses). Each type of SLA is
also associated to a price (SLA Price).
Several of these attributes can be gained from
DEMO diagrams, such as, for example, the SLA
Owner that can be identified by the Actor
Transaction Diagram (ATD) or the SLA Penalties
and the SLA Bonuses that can be gained from the
Action Model (AM).
Thus, this research intends to reduce the gaps by
formally specifying the SLAs, using EO theory as a
foundation.
5 DEMONSTRATION
This section corresponds to the demonstration phase
of DSRM. We evaluated the proposal using an
experiment in order to validate its applicability. The
demonstration occurred in a Portuguese city council
named Pombal (CMP). Pombal is located in Leiria
District and is composed of 17 parishes. It has a total
area of 626.1 km² and a total population of 58,617
inhabitants. The population of the city of Pombal is
about 18,000 inhabitants. CMP employs a total of
389 people with 203 men and 189 women and has
five major departments divided into divisions, units
and sections. In 2010 CMP spent a total of 20 553
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200 € from which 7 542 250 € in human resources
(Pombal City Council, 2011).
In order to identify the services (step one of the
proposal) we interviewed individually 17 employees
from CMP. With the purpose of having an overall
perspective of the entire CMP we have selected
employees from all the departments. During the
interviews participants were asked to describe the
activities performed by CMP. The interviews were
recorded and transcribed as well as checked and
discussed by two interviewers each ensuring
unbiased findings and avoiding misinterpretation as
specified in (Kvale, 2007).
The interviews allowed us to develop an
enterprise description of CMP that was used as input
for the service identification step (proposal first
step). We do not fully describe the six sub steps of
the service identification step due to space
limitation, nevertheless these sub steps are based on
DEMO (Dietz, 2006) and are described in previous
publications (Mendes, Ferreira, & Mira da Silva,
2011) (Mendes, Ferreira, & Mira da Silva, 2012).
The result of this first step is called the Actor
Transaction Diagram (ATD) and we decided to
show only the ATD with information regarding the
Human Resources and IT Service due to space
limitations (Figure ).
Figure 2: ATD with HR and IT.
In the ATD, a transaction/service is represented
using a diamond in a disk that contains the
respective combination of C-acts and a P-act. Each
transaction is connected to two boxes, representing
the initiator and executor actor roles. The initiator is
connected to the transaction symbol using a solid
line, while the executor is connected to the
transaction using a solid line ending in a black
square. The grey boxes refer to composite actor
roles, i.e. elements whose exact structure is not
known. All the environmental elements, i.e.
elements outside the organization that we are
studying, are represented with grey boxes for that
reason. This also means that we can represent the
studied organization with a grey box when referring
to the kernel of the organization, which can be
further specified by using elementary actor roles
represented by white boxes.
We identified 173 services of which 145 are
ontological, 17 are infological and 11 are datalogical
(see Section 3). These services correspond to all
services provided by the five major departments that
constitute the City Council. Figure 2 illustrates
seven major Composite Actor Roles (President, IT
Kernel, Employee, HR Kernel, Special Mobility,
Candidate and Doctor) on a total of nearly 50 across
the entire City Council.
Table 1: Service “Application Development
Specification.
Service Specification - Application Development (T30)
Service Executor
Actor Role Developer (A02)
Contact
Information
General Email: suporte@cm-pombal.pt
Email: xxxxx
Phone: xxxxx
Service Production
Production Act
Application Development is the act of designing
and developing new applications or features
required by other units of the Municipal Council
or by the IT Division.
Production
Information
Used
The object classes used in this services are:
Application, Handbook, Employee, Course
Production Fact Application App has been developed
Production Kind
The production kind of this transaction is:
Ontological
Production
World
Semantics
Application, Handbook, Employee and Course
(See Figure )
Preconditions Hardware Installation (T28)
Postconditions ND
Service Coordination
Coordination
Acts
See
Figure 4: PSD for Service ‘Application
Development’
Figure
Coordination
Kind
This service is a Human Service
Protocol
1. Contact the IT Division;
2. Specifies the Application requirements;
3. Wait for the end of development;
4. Test Application;
5. Application available to the target
audience.
Location Email, Phone
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The IT division operates and maintains the
computer equipment, develops new tools, supports
their applications, and conducts courses to enhance
learning of the new features. We identified 13
services provided by this division: Network
Configuration (T26), Hardware Installation (T28),
Hardware Uninstallation (T29), Hardware
Substitution (T39), Application Development (T30),
Incident Resolution (T31), Database Management
(T32), Software Installation (T35), Software
Uninstallation (T36), Backup Realization (T40),
Handbook Definition (T41), Training (T42) and
Business Intelligence Study Realization (T43).
In order to proceed to the second step of the
proposal (specify the executor, production and
coordination of the services), first we had to model
the Process Model, the Action Model, and the State
Model of Pombal City Council, since some aspects
of the GSSF (used in the second step of the
proposal) depend on these models. We do not
present all of these models due to space limitations.
We applied the Generic Service Specification
Framework (GSSF) to specify the services of Figure
(second step of the proposal). An example of this
specification is illustrated in Table . This table
describes the attributes of the service Application
Development that implements the T30 transaction
and is provided by the IT Division.
The service specified above is called Application
Development and is carried out by a Developer
whose contact is available in the Service Executor
section. In the Service Production area, it is
specified that a new application is produced, which
makes this an ontological service and, based on the
State Model (Figure ), we found the information
classes used in this service: Application, Handbook,
Employee and Course.
Figure 3: State Model for Service 'Application
Development’.
The ontological coexistence rules between these
classes are the following: an Application may have a
Handbook, several Courses and Employees using it.
Additionally, a Course concerns an Application and
it is taught in a certain period to a number of
Employees.
Before this service execution, a precondition
must be guaranteed, since the application
development must be preceded by the hardware
installation (T28). Regarding the post conditions
there are none associated with the Application
Development service. Concerning the Coordination
area, the coordination acts involved in this service
are illustrated by the Process Structure Diagram
(PSD) (Figure 4).
In this diagram we see that the employee makes
a request for a new application or feature and this
request is handled by the developer that, when the
development of the new application ends, starts two
new transactions: write the user manual (Handbook
Definition – T41) and schedule a training on this
new application (Training – T42). In addition, in the
Coordination area the procedure or protocol to
successfully contact the service provider is specified
as well as the location of the service that, in this
case, is by email or phone.
In the third step of the proposal we specified the
SLAs associated to the CMP services using our SLA
proposal (Figure 1). Table illustrates an example of
this specification for the service Application
Development.
Figure 4: PSD for Service ‘Application Development’.
This SLA concerns the development of an
application named WebDoc2.0 and the SLA Owner
is the IT Division Chief. Multiple contacts of the IT
Division Chief are specified in order to be contacted
by the service customer at any time. This SLA was
made on the first day of January of 2011, was valid
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until 31 of November of 2011 and was changed in
July 15. To fulfil this SLA, the service provider
Table 2: SLA “WebDoc 2.0 Development” Specification.
needs to complete all the points specified in the SLA
Provider Responsibilities (completion of ERP
integration, improvement of communication
between citizens and putting into production all
features developed).
This SLA has three types that depend on the date
of completion of the development. Penalties and
bonuses are translated into career points that
influence the career development.
On the one hand, in case of SLA Type
“Overcome goal”, the SLA Owner wins five career
points and can evolve in his career.
On the other hand, if the service provider does
not meet the deadline the SLA Type “Non
Fulfilment Goal” applies and the SLA Owner only
wins one career point and can be fired with probable
cause.
Note that this SLA has no price defined because
this is an internal service to the CMP and no
chargeback is made among the CMP departments.
6 EVALUATION
This section corresponds to the evaluation phase of
DSRM and in order to explain the evaluation we use
the framework proposed in (Pries-Heje, Baskerville,
& Venable, 2004). This framework identifies what is
actually evaluated, how it is evaluated and when the
evaluation takes place.
Table illustrates the answers to the three main
questions that this framework proposes to answer:
What is Actually evaluated? The artifact
evaluated is the proposed set of steps of
Section 4 (a design process) and the results
of applying these steps to the CMP
(Services and SLAs; a design product);
How is it evaluated? We used CMP
employees’ feedback to evaluate the
DEMO-based SLA structure and the CMP
services and SLAs. This represents a
naturalistic evaluation since it was
conducted using a real artifact in a real
organization facing real problems;
When was it evaluated? It was evaluated
ex post (after the design artifact was
developed).
P summarizes the essential characteristics of the
evaluation Process, while C indicates the evaluation
Criteria.
The evaluation was naturalistic since we applied
our proposal in a real organization with real data.
The evaluation was ex post since it occurred after
Service Level Agreement Specification
Generic SLA Information
SLA Name
WebDoc 2.0 Development
SLA Description
SLA concerning the development of a
tool for document management.
SLA Owner
Nome: Nuno Salvador
Category: IT Division Chief
Organic Unit: IT Division
SLA Owner
Contact
Information
Email: xxx
Phone: xxx
SLA Service Application Development (T30)
Temporal SLA Information
SLA Creation
Date
January 1, 2011
SLA Validity
Period
Until November 31, 2011
SLA Version
Control
Information
July 15, 2011
SLA Review
Period
Information
NA
Responsibility SLA Information
SLA Customer
Responsibilities
NA
SLA Provider
Responsibilities
1 - Finish ERP Integration;
2 - Improve communication between the
citizens;
3 - Place in operation all the features
developed.
Specific SLA Information
SLA Type
Overcome Goal
SLA Targets
Performance Until November 15, 2011
SLA Penalties NA
SLA Bonuses
Evaluation Score: 5
Career: Allows career evolution
SLA Price 0 €
SLA Type
Fulfillment Goal
SLA Targets
Performance Until November 31, 2011
SLA Penalties NA
SLA Bonuses Evaluation Score: 3
SLA Price 0 €
SLA Type
Non Fulfillment Goal
SLA Targets
Performance After November 31, 2011
SLA Penalties
Evaluation Score: 1
Career: Can be fired with probable cause
SLA Bonuses NA
SLA Price 0 €
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Table 3: Evaluation strategy.
the demonstration in the CMP. We evaluated both
the proposed set of steps of Section 4 (including the
DEMO-based SLA structure) and the results of
applying these steps to the CMP (Services and SLAs
specification). In order to evaluate the DEMO-based
SLA structure (see Figure ) and the Services and
SLAs specification from CMP we collected
feedback from 23 CMP employees and 7 CMP
customers. They were arbitrarily chosen and were
asked to classify the attributes of the SLA proposal
from 1 to 10 according to the importance (being 1
irrelevant and 10 essential). Figure 5 illustrates the
average and standard deviation per attribute. As can
be seen there was little variation in the answers of
the interviewees in most attributes.
Figure 5: Rating of proposal attributes.
The first 14 attributes had high average scores
(from 7.60 to 8.40) and the remaining two (Bonuses
and Price) had lower classifications (5.90 and 6.85).
These results indicate that the majority of the
proposed attributes (14 in 16) were classified as
important since they scored a minimum of 7.60 in 10
possible points. The remaining two attributes
(Bonuses and Price) scored 5.90 and 6.85 revealing
that they were classified as less important when
comparing to the first 14. These results can be
explained by the fact that there are no chargeback
among the departments of the 30 inquired persons.
Therefore, they value more the attributes that
describe the service quality than the ones that
capture the costs.
Besides this validation, we also validated the
service catalogue from the IT Division with the IT
chief that agreed with all 13 identified services. The
same validation method is being used for other units
of the City Council hoping to have the same
acceptance that in the IT Division.
The definition of a city council service catalogue
has great potential, because the services that this
type of organizations provides to the citizens are
similar. For instance, in Portugal there are 308 city
councils and in theory they all have the same
purpose. Having identified the service catalogue of
one city council we can validate if it is applicable to
other city councils and eventually find some services
that could be provided in cooperation.
Knowing the services and the type of services
provided allows one to understand how the service
provider can improve his performance. For instance,
the service Collect Water Usage – T155 is a
datalogical transaction since it neither involves the
creation of new original facts (ontological) nor
information processing (infological). Hence, it has
large potential to be optimized, since technology can
be used to reduce the effort needed to execute
datalogical acts (Dietz, 2006).
CMP has four employees dedicated to collect
water usage. Assuming that CMP spends 77 555 € a
year with these four employees ((7 542 250 € / 389
employees) * 4 employees) and the other 307 city
councils in Portugal do not have this service
automated and use similar resources on it, then this
would represent an expense of 23 809 468 € a year
in a service that has great potential to be automated.
This value is estimated using only the costs of the
employees’ wages so if we add the supporting costs
(IT support, HR support, etc.) then the estimated
value would certainly be higher.
This kind of analysis has special value because
of the current situation Portugal is in since it points
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some solutions to a number of current challenges
imposed by the Troika memorandum.
7 CONCLUSIONS
There are several solutions that contributed to
closing the gaps, but none solved the problem
completely. Some lacked detail in specifying the
services’ quality (like the Generic Service
Specification Framework), others were not based on
a strong conceptual foundation (such as ITIL,
CMMI or WSLA) and the majority of the web
services based solutions suffer from the web service
tunnel vision.
In this paper we apply our most recent proposal
to specific services in a Portuguese city council. This
proposal is based on the Enterprise Ontology theory
and identifies services that do not create new
original results, therefore services with great
potential to be automated. In this particular city
council we found services that if automated could
save the Portuguese state millions of euros.
Our new SLA proposal revealed to be more
flexible and mature when comparing to the previous
one. The employees’ and customers’ feedback
revealed that in the CMP context 14 in 16 of the
proposal attributes were considered important. This
indicates that this new version of DEMO-based
SLAs has more potential to capture the customers’
expectations than the older version of the proposal
that had only 5 attributes. By specifying these
attributes, customers can structurally define their
expectations which may help the alignment between
customers and service providers. The specification
of the customers’ expectations into SLAs helps the
service providers to understand those expectations
and consequently reduce the gaps among the two.
The last step of DSRM, communication, is being
achieved through scientific publications aimed at the
practitioners and researchers within the service
science area.
As future work, we intend to evaluate the
proposal using practitioners’ feedback. Presently, we
are interviewing recognized practitioners involved in
SLAs specification. Furthermore, we will apply our
proposal in an organization with a more complex
service exchange.
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