Tricks of the Trade: Best Practice Trade Secrets

Many companies are starting to realize the benefits to managing their vast collections of IT resources as services provided to users. This is in contrast to the traditional approach of developing and managing applications that provide capabilities to users. The structure of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can vary greatly depending on your business needs. Here are some best practices for creating different types of SLAs.

Plan the SLA structure

Using your service catalog as an aid, you need to determine the most appropriate SLA structure to ensure that all services and all customers are covered in a manner best suited to the organization's needs. There are a number of options, detailed below. A combination of either of these structures might be appropriate, providing all services and customers are covered, with no overlap or duplication.

Service-based

At times, an SLA covers one service, for all the customers of that service. For example an SLA may be established for an organization's E-mail service, covering all of the customers of that service.

This may appear fairly straightforward, but it is often overly simplistic. Difficulties may arise if the specific requirements of different customers vary for the same service, or if characteristics of the IT Infrastructure mean that different service levels are required. In such cases, separate targets may be needed within the one service agreement.

Customer-based

Customer-based SLAs represent an agreement with an individual customer group, covering all the services they use. For example, agreements may be reached with an organization's Finance Department covering, say, the Finance System, the Accounting System, the Payroll System, the Billing System, the Procurement System and any other IT systems that they use.

Customers may prefer such an agreement, since all of their requirements are covered in a single document.

Multi-level SLAs

Some organizations have chosen to adopt a multi-level SLA structure. For example, a common three-layer structure as follows:

• Corporate Level: covering all the generic SLM issues appropriate to every customer throughout the organization. These issues are likely to be less volatile and so updates are less frequently required.
• Customer Level: covering all SLM issues relevant to the particular customer group, regardless of the service being used.
• Service Level: covering all SLM issues relevant to the specific service, in relation to this specific customer group (one for each service covered by the SLA).

Such a structure allows SLAs to be kept to a manageable size, avoids unnecessary duplication and reduces the need for frequent updates

By Craig Dalton, Senior Consultant, Troux Services Group