Re: dwbp-ISSUE-184: Is an dqv:ServiceLevelAgreement a kind of certificate, or a standard? [Quality & Granularity Vocabulary]

Hello Team


re: http://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/track/issues/184

With thanks to a helpful conversation with my colleague David Brown:


SLA is a type of customer charter.  There is generally a top-level SLA which is a catalogue of services available to a customer together with the qualities available for  each of those services, perhaps with the option of levels of service for a scale of charges or similar.

So, in some respects an SLA is also and aggregation of minor SLAs, one for each service.

SLAs can be generalisable describing a spread of 'offerings' from an organisational unit to any of a range of other organisational units. Equally, it could be an individualised, tailored agreement between two parties.

It has some similarities to a contract - a formally negotiated agreement between parties - the key distinction being that it is not legally binding (otherwise it wouldn't be an SLA, it would be a contract)

But sometimes the levels described in the metrics are aspirational, other times they are definitive.  So sometimes an SLA is a collection of 'promises'.


SLAs are "glued" together by OLAs [Operational Level Agreements] which tend to be between organisational units within larger organisation.  E.g. within a company or government IT service delivery function there will be Desktop support, Network support, Data services etc

OLAs then refer to underpinning contracts with primary suppliers e.g. a company's network service team might have a contract with Vodaphone or other core service supplier.

So, it's perhaps neither a certificate nor a standard.  It is perhaps closer to a promise, but one which once made has a spectrum of potential consequences for the failure to comply with the promise, none of which would be accessible to level of legal redress that would be available under a contract.

I think the key for the dqv is to have a recursive property for the entity ServiceLevelAgreement   so that it can contain other SLAs, and that we should find some appropriate top level 'thing' to subclass SLA from.  Definitions should link with ITIL v3, COBIT etc.

Peter




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