Measuring compliance and deviations in a template-based service contract development process

Abstract

Asset-based approaches, involving the use of standardized reusable components (as opposed to building custom solutions), are increasingly being adopted by IT service industries to achieve higher standardization, quality and cost reduction goals. In this paper, we address issues related to the use of an asset-based approach for authoring service contracts, where standard templates are defined for each type of service offered. The success of such an approach relies on a compliance checking system. We focus on three key components of such a system. The first measures how well actual contracts comply with the standard templates. The second analyzes compliant contracts containing moderate deviations and reports on the consistent patterns of deviations observed for each template to help identify necessary modifications required in templates to keep them up-to-date with evolving business requirements and customer needs. The third analyzes noncompliant contracts and identifies groups within them such that members of each group have enough similarity to each other to warrant consideration for development of new templates for each group. We describe the architecture of the proposed system, our experience in the use of various text analysis techniques to prototype different system components, and the lessons learned. © 2010 IEEE.