Many enterprises that I talk to entrust their IT systems to outsourcing service providers with highly generalized SLAs that don’t necessarily deliver critical application availability. Recently a customer was reviewing their operational support model with me, saying they needed someone to manage their business-critical systems. They need the service provider to ensure end-to-end service levels are met while providing impeccable availability and responsive (and scalable) performance. Have you considered outsourcing your business-critical applications? If so, which ones? And what would your SLAs require? And how should your SLA’s be structured?
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The key is to crafting a service level agreement is to ensure best practices are implemented based on the needs of the business user not for the IT dept. To ensure you have addressed their concerns a number of points should be included and you must be very specific or your expectations will not be met. Define what specific services are to be provided. How the provider will deliver the services. Who will measure service delivery and how. Then, and this is critical, define what happens if the provider fails to deliver. And finally, how the SLA can be changed over time as requirements change.
We've looked at several managed service organizations, most of them have levels of service and corresponding pricing models based on the requirements of the client. Our concern is that they have a generic platform across all processes and we need someone that really knows availability and is flexible enough to rapidly respond to our business needs. Those two requirements are imperative to sustain a competitive position in our industry and most organizations won't sign up for that level of service.