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Software as a Service (SaaS) Quality Management and Service Level Agreement INFuture2015: e-Institutions – Openness, Accessibility, and Preservation, Zagreb, 11-13 November 2015
Corinne Rogers, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia On behalf of Weimei Pan, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies University of British ColumbiaGrant Mitchell, Library and Archive Unit International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
Outline • Background • Quality Management
– Definitions – IT quality management – Quality management process
• Service Level Agreement (SLA)– Quality targets as defined in SLA
• Monitoring of Service Quality – Trust and partnership
• Future Research
Background
• An InterPARES Trust project: TR 02 – Case Study: a SaaS Recruiting Tool
• E-Recruitment – A public-cloud based e-recruitment
application – Core functionalities: creating a new job
opening, approving the new job opening, advertising the job opening on internal and external websites, selecting the preferred candidate, and making an offer
Quality and Quality Management
• Quality:“the total characteristics of a product or service concerning its suitability to fulfill predefined requirements”
-- ISO 8402• Quality management:
“quality policies, quality targets, quality controlling and continuous quality improvement within an organization”
--Praeg and Spath (2009)
IT Quality Management
• An extension of quality management• IT services: a set of utilities used by
business processes
Quality Management Process
Plan Execute Control Improv
e
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• “a binding contract between the service provider and the service customer, which outlines the responsibilities, describes the service to be provisioned, and emergence contacts”
--Qiu et al. (2013)• It is an important instrument helping
the service customer define and measure the service level in quality management
Quality targets as defined in SLA
• The minimum contents a SLA should include:
description of service, service targets, communications and reporting, authorization details and validity period, financial management details, service provider liability and obligations, customer responsibilities, supporting and related services, impact, urgency and priority guidelines, service hours, date exceptions, critical business periods and out-of-hours cover, workload limits, contact details of people authorized to act in case of emergencies, actions to be taken in the event of a service interruption, escalation and notification process, scheduled and agreed interruptions, complaints procedures, housekeeping procedures, exceptions to the terms given in the SLA, and glossary of terms. – Bon et al. (2007)
Quality targets as defined in SLA (cont.)
• Attributes of service– Some attributes (e.g., interoperability,
modifiability, usability, testability, resiliency) are subject to different interpretations and can be very hard to measure.
– Some attributes identified by previous studies are absent from the SLA: change control, and privacy policy
– Records management and long term preservation related qualities are not explicitly identified.
SLA and Quality management
• Though the SLA can serve as a good source to evaluate the quality of service of the service provider, the SLA alone is not adequate to determine and guarantee all the quality of service.
Monitoring of Service Quality
• There are insufficient studies on cloud monitoring.
• Current monitoring tools – general-purpose monitoring services – cloud monitoring services
• Provider dependent monitoring services • Provider independent monitoring services
• These monitoring tools are least supportive of security and privacy assurance management in Clouds
E-Recruitment Monitoring
• Monitoring is absent from the cloud services management portfolio
• Respondents expressed difficulty in monitoring service quality
• Lack of technical assurance introduces risks of misplaced trust
Partnership
• A partnership is observed between the service provider of E-Recruitment and the Federation.
• Interviewee4:“This is why the relationship side is more important than the contractual document. It is really working on how you make that relationship work, what you get out of them, how you shift the balance of power, what respective benefits both parties get.”
Future Research
• How to define records maintenance and preservation quality in SLA?
• How to monitor records maintenance and preservation quality?
• Develop customer friendly cloud-service monitoring tools.
• What are the relationships between trust, partnership, and quantitative monitoring in cloud services quality management?
Thank you!
Weimei Pan
Grant Mitche
ll
