Service level agreements must not be technology-led if
you are to get the best from them, says Philip
Yarnall.
A report from research group YouGov earlier this year
revealed that 21% of businesses do not use service level agreements
as they are considered too difficult to negotiate and too
time-consuming to monitor. But in their current form SLAs are
largely irrelevant to businesses as they are technology-led rather
than business-centric.
After all, an IT metric is not a true reflection of the value of an
IT system as it does not address the impact to the business of good
or bad service.
Market commentators argue that better SLAs can be realised by
managing the performance of IT systems more comprehensively but
many IT directors find that the more complex an SLA becomes the
more unwieldy and irrelevant it becomes.
What suppliers and users are looking for are SLAs that are simpler
and more relevant to business processes. This can only be achieved
if suppliers are prepared to take the time to understand how a
business process depends on IT.
There also appears to be a high level of cynicism at board level
towards suppliers. It is arguable that this exists because
suppliers have failed to understand their role in the business and,
as a result, have consistently failed to support the objectives of
their customers' businesses.
In many cases businesses are deriving 80% of the benefit from 20%
of their systems. Understanding this 20% and getting it right is
far more important to the business and should be the priority for
reporting.
In fact, the key dependencies for many IT directors are
straightforward. For example, a user may identify five key
transactions in an SAP implementation for which response time is
critical. Measuring performance on these transactions is what
matters to the company so a business-centric SLA should prioritise
them specifically.
But if suppliers need to adapt their behaviour, customers need to
change too. Far too often users do not understand their own
end-to-end business processes sufficiently well.
Five years ago very few organisations had a business process plan
but this is changing and companies are becoming more self-aware as
can be seen by the growing endorsement of best practices and the
number or firms which are aligning processes with Information
Technology Infrastructure Library guidelines.
Only once this level of self-awareness has been achieved can there
be a common understanding of objectives and business goals and the
business process can be mapped onto technology appropriately.
Phil Yarnall is strategic marketer and head of
product management at IT services company PinkRoccade UK
