In today's business environment, IT managers have eyes only for technologies and approaches that improve their enterprises' profitability and competitive position, demonstrate the value of the internal IT organization, or otherwise contribute to paying salaries. Increasingly, service-level agreements are being used to help meet these objectives.
The Open Group's Quality of Service task force shared with us its recent research study on current practices related to services and SLAs in enterprises (the Open Group is an international, vendor-neutral consortium that brings together IT buyers and suppliers to lower the time, cost and risks associated with integrating new technology across the enterprise; for more information go to www.opengroup.org). U.S. enterprises represented in the survey came from a variety of vertical markets. There were a total of 151 respondents to a Web-based survey and a number of telephone follow-up calls.
Not Everything Is Rosy
Many enterprises' biggest complaint with their service providers is that they see their SLAs as being difficult to enforce and document, and the agreements often don't have sharp enough teeth (see "SLA Enforcement and Business Issues," right). When deploying or renegotiating SLAs you need to go in with your eyes open--just knowing where pitfalls lie is half the battle.
Don't give up on SLA negotiations, even if you can't get the teeth that you would like--more than half of enterprises surveyed say that SLAs are useful even if there are no penalties involved. For example, assuming you choose good metrics, you can get a sense of where you stand and use this information to leverage future agreements with that provider or obtain better agreements with other service providers. In that vein, make part of the negotiation process delivery of good metrics to show whether the SLA has been met, and ensure that the performance documentation is in a form that is understandable and useful to your organization. Clearly, given the problems and costs associated with SLAs, businesses must have a compelling reason for taking the leap, and indeed, SLAs can support business goals (see "How SLAs Support Business Goals,").
SLAs are so important that a majority of respondents would subscribe to some services only if an SLA were available for it. They also say that SLAs help them compete more effectively: If it's worth the expense to deploy a new network service, it's worth the expense to know if the service is supporting the business goals that drove its deployment. In fact, the majority of enterprises surveyed deploy SLAs with a wide variety of services, ranging from low-level infrastructure and transmission services, such as frame relay, to high-level services, like videoconferencing.
So whether the services you plan on offering are complex or simple, SLAs will help maximize customer (end user) satisfaction. SLAs also will help you be more competitive by letting you know exactly where your dollars are going and if you are getting what you paid for.
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