Capture contract data

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 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.