Digitizing Service Level Agreements in Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture

Abstract

As service-orientation gathers traction in enterprise engineering, more and more business processes and capabilities alike are wrapped up and viewed as services in today's digital enterprises. Digital servitization is neither a rebranding nor a syntax sugar in enterprise engineering. It opens the door to innovative business models, novel system architecture, to name just a few. Central to service provisioning is the notion of commitment that captures contractual agreements between the provider and the consumer of the service in question, describing not only computer-interpretable factors (e.g., reliability, payment), but also business rules (e.g., service penalty) of the commitment. Widely known as the service level agreement, this building block of service-oriented enterprise engineering is pushed towards virtual when it comes to digital servitization. In this article, we propose a descriptive framework for digital enterprise services together with devised techniques for the alignment and reinforcement of the service level agreement. The relevance and applicability of the multi-perspective approach to service engineering are among our findings, which are illustrated using a few examples and a real-life case-study.

PenChain: A Blockchain-Based Platform for Penalty-Aware Service Provisioning

“…PenChain was built with modality in mind by which modular clusters will communicate with each other through APIs. A unit that assesses the satisfaction is located in the same cloud as the "main" of PenChain, which will be invoked in every service transaction 23 via a designated API. The "main" of PenChain then triggers a smart contract to update the provider's rating according to the confirmation returned from the assessment unit.…”

“…In our previous studies, we made the case for penalty-aware SLAs in the tourism sector [22], we investigated how digitizing dynamic SLAs makes the enforcement of the penalty rules programmable [23], we conceptualized the SLAs for data service provisioning in smart farming [24]. This article reports on our full-fledged work on the conception, construction, and validation of such a cross-domain platform for SLA-minded service lookup called PenChain.…”

PenChain: A Blockchain-Based Platform for Penalty-Aware Service Provisioning

“…PenChain was built with the modality in mind, by which modular clusters will communicate with each other through APIs. A unit that assesses customer satisfaction is located in the same cloud as the ''main'' of PenChain, which will be invoked in every service transaction 23 via a designated API. The ''main'' of PenChain then triggers a smart contract to update the provider's rating according to the confirmation returned from the assessment unit.…”

“…In our previous studies, we advocated for penalty-aware SLAs in the tourism sector [22], we investigated how digitizing dynamic SLAs makes the enforcement of the penalty rules programmable [23], we conceptualized the SLAs for data service provisioning in smart farming [24]. This article reports on our full-fledged work on the conception, construction, and validation of such a cross-domain platform for SLA-minded service lookup called PenChain.…”