Abstract
In a changing and competitive business world, business processes are at the heart of modern organizations. In some cases, service level agreements (SLAs) are used to regulate how these business processes are provided. This is usually the case when the business process is outsourced, and some guarantees about how the outsourcing service is provided are required. Although some work has been done concerning the structure of SLAs for business processes, the definition of service level objectives (SLOs) remains a manual task performed by experts based on their previous knowledge and intuition. Therefore, an evidence-based approach that curtails humans involvement is required for the definition of realistic while challenging SLOs. This is the purpose of this paper, where performance-focused process mining, goal programming optimization techniques, and simulation techniques have been availed to implement an evidence-based framework for the definition of SLAs. Furthermore, the applicability of the proposed framework has been evaluated in a case study carried out in a hospital scenario.
This work was partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER), the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 645751 (RISE_BPM), the Spanish and the Andalusian R&D&I programs (grants TIN2015-70560-R, P12-TIC-1867), the National Research Foundation of Korea (No. NRF-2014K1A3A7A030737007).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Harmon, P.: The scope and evolution of business process management. In: Brocke, J., Rosemann, M. (eds.) Handbook on Business Process Management, vol. 1, pp. 169–194. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-00416-2_3
del-Río-Ortega, A., Gutiérrez, A.M., Durán, A., Resinas, M., Ruiz–Cortés, A.: Modelling service level agreements for business process outsourcing services. In: Zdravkovic, J., Kirikova, M., Johannesson, P. (eds.) CAiSE 2015. LNCS, vol. 9097, pp. 485–500. Springer, Cham (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-19069-3_30
Alves, T.L., Ypma, C., Visser, J.: Deriving metric thresholds from benchmark data. In: 26th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2010), pp. 1–10 (2010)
de Leoni, M., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Dees, M.: A general process mining framework for correlating, predicting and clustering dynamic behavior based on event logs. Inf. Syst. 56, 235–257 (2016)
Aouni, B., Kettani, O.: Goal programming model: a glorious history and a promising future. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 133, 225–231 (2001)
Wichura, M.J.: Algorithm as 241: the percentage points of the normal distribution. J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. C (Appl. Stat.) 37(3), 477–484 (1988)
Whitley, E., Ball, J.: Statistics review 2: samples and populations. Crit. Care 6(2), 143 (2002)
Rozinat, A., Mans, R., Song, M., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Discovering simulation models. Inf. Syst. 34(3), 305–327 (2009)
Cardoso, J., Barros, A., May, N., Kylau, U.: Towards a unified service description language for the internet of services: requirements and first developments. In: 2010 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC), pp. 602–609, July 2010
Wieder, P., Butler, J., Theilmann, W., Yahyapour, R. (eds.): Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing, vol. 2506. Springer, New York (2011). doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-1614-2
Sauvé, J., Marques, F., Moura, A., Sampaio, M., Jornada, J., Radziuk, E.: SLA design from a business perspective. In: Schönwälder, J., Serrat, J. (eds.) DSOM 2005. LNCS, vol. 3775, pp. 72–83. Springer, Heidelberg (2005). doi:10.1007/11568285_7
Kieninger, A., Baltadzhiev, D., Schmitz, B., Satzger, G.: Towards service level engineering for IT services: defining IT services from a line of business perspective. In: 2011 Annual SRII Global Conference, pp. 759–766, March 2011
del-Río-Ortega, A., García, F., Resinas, M., Weber, E., Ruiz, F., Ruiz-Cortés, A.: Enriching decision making with data-based thresholds of process-related KPIs. In: Dubois, E., Pohl, K. (eds.) CAiSE 2017. LNCS, vol. 10253, pp. 193–209. Springer, Cham (2017). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-59536-8_13
Rodriguez, R.R., Saiz, J.J.A., Bas, A.O.: Quantitative relationships between key performance indicators for supporting decision-making processes. Comput. Ind. 60(2), 104–113 (2009)
Diamantini, C., Genga, L., Potena, D., Storti, E.: Collaborative building of an ontology of key performance indicators. In: Meersman, R., et al. (eds.) OTM 2014. LNCS, vol. 8841, pp. 148–165. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). doi:10.1007/978-3-662-45563-0_9
Mansar, S.L., Reijers, H.A.: Best practices in business process redesign: validation of a redesign framework. Comput. Ind. 56(5), 457–471 (2005)
Watson, H.J., Wixom, B.H.: The current state of business intelligence. Computer 40(9), 96–99 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cho, M. et al. (2017). A New Framework for Defining Realistic SLAs: An Evidence-Based Approach. In: Carmona, J., Engels, G., Kumar, A. (eds) Business Process Management Forum. BPM 2017. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 297. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65015-9_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65015-9_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-65014-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-65015-9
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)