Alsbridge Asks, Is Your SLA Missing These Basic Measurements?

A new report from award-winning global sourcing advisory and benchmarking firm, Alsbridge, Inc., reveals four basic SLA metrics within the outsourcing marketplace that should be included in your outsourcing contracts in order to evaluate the service levels you are currently using or are developing as part of an outsourcing contract negotiation.

As the outsourcing industry has matured, providers have developed a multitude of service level measures they can propose to their clients. But, without the proper alignment of IT service levels to the needs of the clients’ business, companies can fall into the trap of seeing service level measures that exceed their targeted performance levels yet still experiencing IT delivery issues.

“When negotiating a new outsourcing agreement, clients face the challenge of determining the service levels that are most meaningful to the business,” says Ben Trowbridge, CEO, Alsbridge, Inc. “The intent of a service level agreement is to measure the provider’s overall performance by virtue of concise, unambiguous metrics with targeted levels of performance that are easily understandable by the client community and simple to validate from a client’s perspective.”

According to Alsbridge, there are literally hundreds of “typical” IT metrics that can be reported on. However, while it is true that some IT-specific metrics should be in place, most should have a focus squarely on measuring the delivery of services to the end users. Fortunately, there are four basic SLA metrics that provide the strong framework needed to evaluate the service levels you are currently using or are developing as part of an outsourcing contract negotiation.

Does your SLA include these four basic metrics?

 - Service Desk - In many companies the service desk is the primary touch point into IT, and therefore measuring its performance aligns nicely to the business perception of IT.
- Projects - Project work performed by IT is usually the work most aligned and most visible to the business.
- Change Management - Measuring and reporting the volume and success of changes to the environment is a good way to showcase the volume of work being done by IT “behind the curtain” and to illustrate how much goes right.
- General - Several other measures are closely aligned with business perception including on-time reporting, problem resolution and application availability.