Customer Driven SLAs
How do I build an SLA in the language of my customer?
By understanding how the customer uses IT to execute business. Breaking down the business processes into subordinate business activities and tasks, an SLA is developed that maps directly to the business. It is essential that all terms and measures of the SLA are driven by the business customers and end users.
The Business Weighted Performance SLA Report displayed here accurately shows the performance against the needs of the business as defined by the SLA. User Count and Behavior, Location Specifics and Business Calendars are incorporated into the performance SLA report.
How do I accurately monitor my commitment to my customer?
Once key business processes and activities are captured, it is essential to determine the acceptable service levels required in order to support successful business execution. This provides the foundation for delivering objective metrics of IT performance in the customer’s terms.
Can I turn an SLA into a business improvement tool?
When an SLA is designed around objective and accurate metrics, the SLA becomes a yardstick of where IT is delivering value and where it is not. These SLA metrics are used to determine where business improvements can be made through IT efforts.
How do I ensure proper business weighting of SLAs?
Business weighting is an essential element of any IT metric, especially in the execution of SLAs. The customer requires the SLA to be focused by importance of the business processes to be executed. Actual usage and cost parameters are the best way to apply weighting to each SLA component, while arbitrary weighting factors should be avoided.
How does EvidantSP address the area of customer driven SLAs?
Most organizations have or are investing in transactional data collection tools from leading companies such as Mercury, IBM Tivoli, CA, Compuware, Tevron, Auditec and others. EvidantSP plugs into one or more of these tools to create a common business transaction model.
EvidantSP’s Business Activity Toolkit (BAT) captures:
- Business processes, activities and tasks
- Required service levels and SLA parameters
- Usage and risk parameters required for SLA weighting
EvidantSP combines the transactional IT data with the service level model captured in BAT. By doing this, each IT transaction can be measured for its contribution to SLA performance. Combining transactional SLA measurements over time and business area yields overall metrics that translate into real business SLA execution. In addition, an organization’s KPIs can be overlaid to create a correlation between SLAs and business results.
The Business Weighted Availability SLA Reports displayed here accurately depicts how service levels correspond to the needs of the customer. What is measured is the business weighted ability of IT to meet acceptable availability levels. User Count and Behavior, Location Specifics and Business Calendars are incorporated into the availability SLA report.