Integrating IT Service Management within the Enterprise Architecture

Published work in the IT services area is generally centered on the description of management best practices or specific technological issues. There is a lack of empirical studies the relationship among service level agreements (the quality parameters of service agreed between customer and provider) and the required IT parts to deliver IT services. In the ITIL framework, the service level agreements process is fully described, albeit without a formal representation. Enterprise Architecture frameworks provide a mean for formal description of IT and business parts of organizations and their interrelationships, however without reference to service level agreements. In this research, we intend to derive a formal specification of service level agreements by integrating IT Services Management within an Enterprise Architecture framework. This integration will facilitate the provision of a business-aligned automatic checking of compliance between agreed and provided services.