How to Support the Negotiation of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for Your Client/Server Application?

An increasing number of organisations decide to promote their core competence only. So, they outsource the required IT Services to an IT service provider and negotiate a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which is the contract between the provider and the organisation (customer). One of the major problems of SLA negotiation is the knowledge gap between provider and customer. The knowledge gap is the mutual lack of knowledge about organizational structures and technical aspects of the application environment. The proposed concept supports the standardisation of SLA negotiation for complex client/server applications. It is useful for service providers who have to establish SLAs repeatedly for the same application and for software manufacturers who want to support the usage of their product in outsourcing contexts. The concept is based on the application introduction process and therefore ensures completeness of the SLA by identification and decrease of the knowledge gap. It comprises several components that accompany the negotiation and allow the specification of the future SLA. The central component is the SLA Mapper that reveals the parts of SLA to be negotiated according to the nature and width of the knowledge gap. The concept and the components have been implemented for SAP R/3.