RiPROSA Risk-based Decisions for Process-Oriented Service Level Agreements

Today's shift from a product- to a service-oriented economy entails fundamental technical, organizational and economic challenges. The value generated by a service is mainly represented by intangible elements exposed at execution (Hill, 1977). Hence, service consumers expect a service to function reliably and to deliver a consistent outcome at a variety of levels, i.e. Quality of Service (QoS). The service quality is influenced by functional and non-functional properties as well as the service context experienced by the consumer, e.g. the business process (BP) context the service is invoked in. From an economic perspective, QoS is the most important characteristic that differentiates service offerings and leverages market advantage, as price competition is tough due to low variable costs of service provisioning. Thus, QoS is the key criterion to keep the business side competitive as it has serious implications on the provider and consumer (Papazoglou, 2008).