ELECTRONIC CONTRACTS EXTENDED WITH BUSINESS LEVEL AGREEMENTS TO SUPPORT THE STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT BETWEEN BUSINESS AND IT AREAS

Abstract

Through electronic contracts, using partner organizations, it is possible to outsource electronic services to be composed into business processes and set Service Level Agreements (SLA), which do not ensure per se the strategic alignment between the IT department and business areas of the involved organizations. This paper presents a pre-existent approach for e-contract settlement which was extended in order to encompass a Business Level Agreement (BLA), which is used to align the organization's goals and objectives. This extended approach aims at making it possible to ensure that technical services under the IT responsibility do not cause negative impacts on the execution of business processes requested by the business areas of the organizations. In this paper, we briefly present the approach used as the grounds for the proposed extension as well as an analysis of its pros and cons, based on examples of artifacts produced using the extended approach.