23-07-2012, 11:53 AM
Building Service Level Agreement Contracts A Best Practices Approach
Building Service Level Agreement.pdf (Size: 42.91 KB / Downloads: 375)
Why Have Service Level Agreements?
SLAs are critical towards formalizing expectations around services with end
users and customers. Without these, customer expectations will assume that
everything will be delivered and available at a 100% level all the time.
Very little can be done about poor service when there is no definition what
good service is. Objectives should be set that describe items such as response
times, availability, turnaround and accuracy. Customers and IT should
commit to a mutually acceptable means of verifying compliance with service
objectives and agree on actions that must take place when exceptions occur.
Determining Customer Services
It will be necessary to identify what critical customer workloads are. From
this a specific service level can be derived. Workloads can be defined as one
or more customer functions that require service from IT. Examples of these
might include items such as:
• Processing patient accounts in a hospital.
• Entering orders from customers on a phone.
• Accessing E-Mail.
• Retrieving and creating memos.
Each of the above have an associated level of service that allows that function
to be accomplished successfully. This level might include availability of
service to that function. (i.e; E-Mail will be available from 8AM to 9PM on
weekdays). It might also include a level of response. (i.e; Order Entry
transactions on a terminal must provide a response time less than 5 seconds
85% of the time).
Most organizations have found it helpful to implement an ITIL Service
Catalog to better define what these services are. With this, the SLA contract
would only need to reference those service descriptions. The Catalog can also
serve to centralize all of these definitions in one place.