Those of you particularly concerned with data architecture may want to check out Dr. Arnon Rosenthal's work; I just re-visited his site tonight and was reminded of the uniformly high quality of this man's research and thought.
I found his recent work on Data Service Agreements: Toward a Data Supply Chain particularly good; he proposes the concept of Data Service Agreement:
"DSAs are a specialization of service level agreements (SLA) between service providers and consumers [Wust02]. Typically, SLAs emphasize performance metrics about time (e.g., response or problem resolution time) or availability (e.g., maximum percentage of downtime). However, we are aware of no prior work on SLAs to address data obligations (e.g., the need to provide data of a certain quality at specified time intervals)."
As a service management approach, a DSA as he describes it might be more of an internal service (OLA) or underpinning contract, but (as he notes) there is really no other work in this area, so hats off to Dr. Rosenthal for starting a conversation here.
-Charlie
