RMS Service Level Management provides a straightforward yet all encompassing solution that allows the Customer and the IT department to develop a true partnership.
This partnership is based on a mutually beneficial agreement, moving away form the more traditional technology focused Service Level Agreement (SLA) – which quite often can fall into disrepute and lead to a blame culture – halting any real improvements to services taking place.
Service Level Management ensures that the service targets that have been agreed with the Customer are documented in the Service Level Agreements and that these are monitored and reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that the service levels are being met. Equally, operation level targets (targets required to meet service targets) need to be understood, documented and monitored. These operation targets are documented in an Operation Level Agreement (OLA). The OLA targets can subsequently be associated with alerting and escalation routines, in the Service Desk operation, to ensure that the service targets will be achieved.
ITIL Service Level Management is defined as "the process of defining, agreeing, documenting and managing the levels of customer IT service, that are required and cost justified." (Office of Government Commerce, ITIL—The key to Managing IT Services, Service Delivery, December 2001).
IT organisations tend to think in terms of technical components, such as databases, networks and job schedules. Other parts of the business, however, think in terms of service, such as back office functions, the quality of customer-facing processes and the level of service that is being provided to business partners. As a result, most companies have no way of relating their operational technical metrics and service desk processes into meaningful services understood by the business, nor do they have the tools to relate critical business services back to technical metrics. This disconnect can lead to disruptions in business services that result in end-user dissatisfaction, missed business objectives, and increased costs.
Your IT organisation needs to look at service from the both the IT operational side and the IT Service Desk side, and Service Level Management enables you to do just that.
Service Level Management encompasses four important functions:
Through these four steps, you will be better able to ensure that your organisation is effectively meeting the needs of your business.
