Contract Management for Cloud Services: Information modelling aspects

Contract Management Processes play a central role in Management of Cloud Services and require suitable software solutions to support it. Contracts for the Cloud must combine international legal, financial, technical and operational aspects in a concise and expressive form, able to drive the business, but also to minimize any controversy in case of problems. Moreover, it must cover a wide range of scenarios: from well-known standard situations (e.g. to provide email, web hosting or housing to private and small companies) to highly customized ones (Government, large companies and strategic customers may have very specific requests which also affect contracts). In all cases software support is essential, during the whole contract lifecycle, from definition to execution, up to the conclusion. In this scenario we propose an approach to Cloud Services´ Contract Management (CM), which includes process and information modeling, and in this paper we discuss the validation of information modeling in a focus group of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) .