Cloud services for SMEs: Contract Management's requirements specification

Abstract

Software tools for Contract Management (CM) are designed to support a wide range of contracts, but they can fall short in the case of cloud contracts. Cloud services, in fact, cross national boundaries and this entails complex problems (security, non disclosure, privacy, …) about applicable laws, jurisdiction, accountability, third parties etc. Moreover, cloud services must be monitored and managed according to specific contract's elements (service level agreements, penalties, etc. ) and this prefigures tighter integration among CM tools and other IT management tools. These aspects are even more relevant to Small and Medium IT Enterprises (SMEs) adopting open CM tools to manage their contracts about own cloud services, because they often lack skills, maturity and sophisticated tools already acquired by the larger companies. In this scenario we propose a requirement elicitation approach based on CM process modeling and information modeling to extend the current generation of open CM tools with the above mentioned features, for SMEs.