Abstract
The cloud services have offered new possibilities for services fulfilment and although the cloud has been a technology breakthrough, the problems it raises go beyond technical issues. Indeed, the organization-oriented issues related to cloud services are getting more attention and the dialogue is moving away from technical to non-technical issues. Our research deals with the gap between customers’ expectations and the perceived service, a problem that we also found in the cloud services area. We propose to close this gap by formally specifying the customers’ expectations into Service Level Agreements (SLAs) using a process based on the Enterprise Ontology. We have already evaluated this proposal in several contexts (from public city councils to private banks) and in this paper we describe a field study in a cloud services provider. The evaluation was positively carried out by means of interviews, the Four Principles from Österle et al., and the Moody and Shanks Quality Framework.
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Carlos Mendes is a PhD student at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon and a researcher at INOV. His PhD thesis focuses on the gap between customers’ expectations and perceived service and he proposes to solve it using dynamic Service Level Agreements negotiation.
Mário Almeida holds a master degree from Instituto Superior Técnico in the area of enterprise information system. His dissertation focused on the specification of Service Level Agreements based on the DEMO to model the customers’ expectations in order to solve the gap between customers’ expectations and the perception of those by the service providers.
Miguel Mira da Silva received a PhD in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow and more recently a “Sloan Fellowship” from the London Business School. Currently, Miguel is Professor of Information Systems in the Technical University of Lisbon and group leader at the INOV research institute.
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Mendes, C., Almeida, M. & Mira da Silva, M. Applying DEMO-based SLAs to cloud services. J Serv Sci Res 5, 95–123 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12927-013-0003-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12927-013-0003-z