Using DEMO-based SLAs for Improving City Council Services

Abstract

According to data from the Portuguese Association of City Councils (DGAL -Portuguese abbreviation) the 308 city councils in Portugal employ about 135 000 people and spend about 3.8 billion euros a year (Ministry of Finance and Public Administration, 2010). In this paper we describe the implementation of our most recent proposal to specify the services quality in the city council of Pombal (CMP) in Portugal. This proposal is a new version of the DEMO-based SLAs with a more complex structure of Service Level Agreement (SLA) attributes. This proposal is based on the Enterprise Ontology theory and identifies services that do not create new original results, therefore services with great potential to be automated. We evaluated the new proposal's version by collecting feedback from CMP employees and customers. Moreover, we found some possible improvements that could save millions of euros to the Portuguese state.