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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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