Capture contract data

The license package Contract Management is required to work with contracts.

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:

The contract in its entirety is not captured in Alfabet. 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.

Users with the user profiles Portfolio Manager, and Portfolio Admin can add and edit contracts in Alfabet. Click for an overview of permission concepts.

  1. Go to Business Architecture > Contracts and click New > Contract. Define a unique name and basic attributes and click OK.

    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 or you can navigate to an contract's content area and define it in more detail there.

  2. Specify data in the data workbench or click the Navigate  Navigate button next to a contract 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.

Go to the contract's content area > Overview.

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 contract deliverable that are addressed by the contract.
  • Vendor/Provider Organization: Each contract requires a vendor or organization that providing the contract deliverable addressed by the contract.

Define the lifecycle attributes. Go to the LIfecycle Data attribute box and define the following:

  • 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 to prevent it from unknowingly becoming obsolete.
  • Predecessor: The contract that came before this contract.
  • 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.

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.
  1. 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.
  2. 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. Each contract may have unlimited number of contract items defined.

Contract items may have different lifecycles than the contract it is defined for. You can capture costs as well as specify the contract deliverables for each contract item. The contract item inherits the authorized user definition from its parent contract.

  1. Go to the contract's content area > Overview > Contract Items.
  2. Click New > New Contract Item.
  3. Capture the basic data for the contract item and click OK.
  4. Go to the contract items content area to document its costs and contract deliverables

A contract deliverable is the obligated deliverable that must be provided to fulfill the terms of a contract or contract item. A contract deliverable has a delivery date and a quantity that must be delivered as well as the application, component, physical server, or virtual server that is targeted by the deliverable.

Document the deliverables required to fulfill a contractual agreement as well as the architecture elements in the IT landscape that consume the contract deliverables. This helps you to assess the validity of contracts so that you can maximize the use of existing contracts, terminate contracts in a timely way, and avoid unnecessary costs associated with obsolete or redundant contracts

  1. Go to the contract's content area > Architecture Context > Contract Deliverables.
  2. Click New > Contract Deliverable.
  3. Capture the basic data including the asset that is the deliverable in the Architecture Element field and click OK.
  4. Review the Contract Deliverable - Lifecycles view to analyze the start and and end of the contract and contract items and the lifecycles of the applications targeted by the contract deliverable.
    • A contract with a ContractReviewDate review date milestone is close to the current date, which is visualized by the blue vertical line. Contracts with an impending review data should be assessed to see whether a successor contract is available.
    • A contract deliverable showing a ContractDeliverageUsageIssue diamond on the bar indicates that more licenses are allocated for the contract deliverable than are permissible.

To specify the contract deliverable for a contract item, go to the contract's content area > Overview > Contract Items view. Select a contract item and click the  Navigate navigate button. Go to the contract's content area > Architecture Context > Contract Deliverables view.

The following business questions rely on contract data: