New top goal proposal: Management and SLA

I was reading our requirements document and realized that there is not a proper attention being paid to a very important aspect of a service: agreements between a user and the owner. This is not any less important element than security for that sake. How can business components comprise a "digital economy" without agreements?
Now, agreements have to be established, maintained, accounted for, and may be enforced. Management metrics/instrumentation is merely "how" details of a bigger goal, and the Reliability is an intermediate effect/characteristic.
Reliability goal has other aspects in messaging, etc. and while I do not want to contend with it in any way, I'd like to pull Manageability and SLAs higher on the stack. Here is my proposal for the new top goal.

Goal: Manageability and Service Agreements
Web Services Architecture must provide a manageable environment for establishing, maintaining and enforcing Service Level Agreements.

Critical success factors for this goal are:
To develop standard reference architecture for Web Services that:

1. Identifies how to express SLAs and associate them with Web services
1.1 Service usage policies
1.2 Web service licensing standards
1.3 Identify technical/legal boundary

2. Identifies automatic/manual SLA negotiation process

3. Identifies how agreements are established and preserved
3.1 License persistence and verification procedures
3.2 Privacy of SLAs
3.3 Integrity and non-repudiation of SLAs

4. Identifies management/instrumentation/metrics standards/technologies necessary to meter and account for service usage
4.1 - subsume/reference D-AC018

5. Identifies procedures/standards necessary to maintain the agreement
5.1. Identify technology/commerce boundary

6. Identifies SLA enforcement procedures
6.1 Usage/metrics reconciliation procedures
6.2 Attempt/provide for automatic conflict resolution
6.3 Identify technology/legal boundary

-- Igor Sedukhin .. (Igor.Sedukhin@ca.com)
-- (631) 342-4325 .. 1 CA Plaza, Islandia, NY 11788

Received on Friday, 31 May 2002 13:03:43 UTC