Capture contract data
To work with contracts, you must have a license to the extension package Contract Management.
In Alfabet, a contract stipulates the terms of agreement between organizations buying products and services that are relevant for the IT architecture and organizations or vendors providing the products and services. Typical contracts relevant to the IT enterprise:
- License, maintenance, and service contracts for applications and technologies
- Operations contracts for physical and virtual servers and their deployments
- Help desk management contracts for applications necessary to support business processes
- Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) contracts
- Statements of Work (SOW) contracts managing the execution of projects
- Contractor management contracts on a time and material basis
The contract in its entirety is not captured in the repository. Instead it is documented in terms of its name, contract number, start and end dates, and its associated costs. The contract also includes the organization that is buying the application or component as well as the vendor or organization that is providing the IT asset.
The contract can be directly linked to the applications and components that it delivers. If a contract is large, you can divide it up into several different contract items to manage the deliverables as well as which organization is responsible for that part of the contract as well as. For example, a contract may have a contract item for the license purchase of a software product and another contract item for the maintenance of the software product.
You can logically structure and bundle the contracts into contract groups in order to evaluate various aspects of the contract portfolio.
The license package Contract Management is required to work with contracts.
Users with the user profiles Portfolio Manager, and Portfolio Admin can add and edit contracts in Alfabet. Click for an overview of permission concepts.
You can add a new contract from anywhere in the product via the orange New button in the header. Or go to Business Architecture > Contracts. Click New > Contract
Click the Navigate 
button next to an application to open its content area. Specify the contract's attributes as well as the relationships that the contract has to other assets in the repository.
Try to capture as much information as possible about the contract because complete data considerably improves the results of business questions and other analytics.
Once a contract is in the repository, you can define more details about the contract in the Contracts data workbench.
Per default, the data workbench displays only a set of basic attributes. You can add more columns to capture other attributes directly in the data workbench via the Structure column. Click to learn about how to use data workbenches.
Or you can select an individual contract in the data workbench and navigate to its content area and specify and analyze the contract in detail. In the data workbench, click the Navigate button to open the contract's content area. Go to the Overview page.
Define the contract's basic data.
- Name: (Mandatory) Enter a meaningful name for the contract that is known by the users in your enterprise.
- Contract Number: The contract number provided for the legal contract.
- Authorized User: The user who creates the contract is the authorized user per default. This can be changed.
- Authorized User Groups: Select one or more authorized user groups that shall have write permissions to the contract. All users in the authorized user group can edit the contract.
Define the organizations and vendors.
- Buyer: Each contract requires a buyer. This is the organization buying the applications and components that are addressed by the contract.
- Vendor/Provider Organization: Each contract requires a provider. This is the vendor or organization providing the applications and components addressed by the contract.
Define the lifecycle attributes..
- Start Date and End Date: The start and end date captures the contract's period of validity. Click the calendar icon to select the date or enter the date in the date format Month/Day/Year. For example: 4/30/2026
- Review Date: The point in time when the contract should be reviewed.
- Predecessor: The contract that came before this contract.
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Release Status: Describes the governance status of the contract over its lifecycle and thus indicates how well users can trust the information. The release status determines whether a contract can or cannot be deleted. Possible values are:
- Draft: The status of the contract when initiated.
- In Negotiation: The contract is currently being negotiated between both parties. A contract with this release status cannot be deleted.
- Signed: A final agreement between both contract parties has been reached. A contract with this release status cannot be deleted.
- Retired: The contract is no longer relevant for operational purposes.
Capture the contract's costs. Specify the total cost of the contract deliverable in the Cost field or the monthly cost in the Monthly Cost field. Be sure to specify the currency used for the costs in the Currency field.
Roles can be assigned to a contract in the Contracts data workbench or the contract content area via Overview > Responsibilities.
Each role column represents the responsibility that a user or organization has for the contract. A person or organization can have one of the following roles or a custom role added by your company:
- Business Owner: A person or organization that owns the contract and understands its purpose for the business.
- Stakeholder: A person or organization that has an interest in the contract and therefore requires read-only access permissions.
- Click a column cell to open a selector to define the role for the contract. Depending on the role column, the selector may have a section for both Person and Organization.
- Expand the relevant section and select the person or organization to assign their role to the contract.
A contract item is a part of a contract that a specified organization is typically responsible for maintaining or acting upon. Contract items may have different lifecycles than the contract and allow for costs to be defined. Each contract may have unlimited number of contract items defined. The contract item inherits the authorized user definition from its parent contract.
- Go to the contract's content area > Overview > Contract Items.
- Click New > New Contract Item.
- Capture the basic data for the contract item and click OK.
A contract deliverable constitutes the applications, components, physical or virtual servers, or projects that must be provided to fulfill the terms of the contract or contract item.
- Go to the contract's content area > Architecture Context > Contract Deliverables.
- Click New > Contract Deliverable.
- Capture the basic data including the asset that is the deliverable in the Architecture Element field and click OK.
The following business questions rely on contract data: