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:
- 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 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, components, business services, support services, physical servers, and virtual servers 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.
Add contracts to the repository
Users with the user profiles Portfolio Manager, and Portfolio Admin can add and edit contracts in Alfabet . Click for an overview of permission concepts.
- 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.
- Specify data in the data workbench or click the 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.
Specify the contract's attributes
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.
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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.
Define the stakeholders and business owners for a contract
A role represents a functional responsibility that a user or organization has for the contract. Assigning users and organizations to roles is critical to understanding responsibility for assets in the IT and is required to answer the business question Who is responsible for our assets?.
Responsibilities are based on preconfigured role types. Your company may also configure custom role types via the Portfolio Admin user profile. Depending on the role type, a specified user and/or a specified organization may fulfill the responsibility for the component. A user assigned responsibility via a role has read-only permissions to the component. To change data about the component, they must also be specified as an authorized user or member of a n authorized user group.
Roles can be assigned to a contract in the Contracts data workbench or the contract content area via Overview > Responsibilities.
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 in the relevant role field to open the selector.
- Expand the ORGANIZATION or USER sections in the selector and select the person or organization fulfilling the role.
- Click OK to save the role definition and close the selector.