Delegating management tasks through negotiation and contracting in the open service market

With the aim of reducing the complexity and overhead of management activities to Customers of information systems, this work proposes the delegation of management tasks between autonomous administrative domains. This delegation is modelled considering the emerging electronic service market, such that Customers may selectively delegate management tasks over their resources to various Management Service Providers. In order to establish the co-operation for management delegation while maintaining the autonomy of Customers and Providers, an approach based on negotiation is followed. The result of this negotiation is a contract which is enforced during service provisioning. This paper concentrates on the proposed contract and its negotiation. Due to the straight relation of the mechanisms here developed with electronic commerce efforts, the generalisation of the results here described should contribute to put forward electronic commerce.