Towards improving enterprise performance with Service Level Agreements

The BPM-SOA combination is being advocated as the best approach for enterprises to reach the desired business agility and responsiveness to changing business requirements as it brings the service-based business processes employing loosely-coupled services. However, in order to have a certain business, the behavior and non-functional properties of these services such as response time, throughput and availability should be guaranteed and this can be specified by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In this regard, our work expresses SLAs for the enterprise domain in a machine understandable format. we propose an ontology-based representation model of SLA and utilize the business services performance requirements specified as Key Indicators (KPIs and KQIs) to define SLA parameters. The purpose is to make it possible to monitor business processes based on SLA in order to assure compliance with business requirements and targeted objectives. In general, this model can help automate the process of SLA representation, monitoring and taking actions in case of violations in SOA and business process domains. At the end, an SLA monitoring prototype system is proposed to show how our model can be deployed.