SLAs Just Don't Matter...

I see the title grabbed your attention in these days where there is a lot of talk about managing services, writing service catalogs, defining the managing service level agreement (SLA), SLA reporting and the list goes on. Why is there so much ado about SLAs? Let me explain.

When we engage in a service offering with someone on the outside, we expect a certain level of availability, performance and responsiveness when something does go wrong. This is the basis of the SLA and the agreement we must enter when contracting outside services and these do matter.

Internal SLA’s have long since been hard to calculate, report and are just that...after the fact reporting, much like financial reporting after the quarter. Depending upon faith of accuracy, the reports tend not to be very meaningful in light of the cost of developing and generating them in a timely manner.

In addition, as an internal service provider, the penalty for missing the objective tends to go two ways: it’s either nothing or very high with the threat of an outsourcer knocking on the CEO’s door.

What would make all this effort more relevant? The ability to understand what drives the organization, business KPI’s, managing impact based upon business relevance, historical trend analysis for purposes of positive changes and proactive management before the end of the reporting period. Internal SLAs can be invaluable as a tool to understand the business and manage the supporting technology in alignment to the business of the organization, however, most look at them as after the fact reporting.

SLAs don’t matter when used just to report, SLAs can be invaluable when used to manage and drive the business!