Service Level Management

The foundation for good IT service starts with customer-focused service level agreement (SLA).  However, many SLAs ignore the most important component of delivering IT service: the end user.  Without an understanding of the end-user experience, you’ll find it tough to establish, monitor,  report and continually manage service levels in a way that is both comprehensible and meaningful to the business.

Key challenges to managing service levels

The truth is most SLAs today focus more on what IT is comfortable in measuring, such as  infrastructure components, than on what truly matters to the business: end users and customers. But that’s certainly not what IT intends. So what makes it hard for IT organizations to manage service levels that satisfy both IT and the business?

1. Establishing realistic, business-oriented SLAs—Because many infrastructure monitoring tools can’t baseline quality levels from the end-user perspective, IT is forced to focus more on infrastructure components than business-oriented ones for SLAs.
2. Monitoring service-level compliance--Without a proactive approach to measuring service-level compliance, customers and end user are more likely to discover a service disruption before IT teams do. This puts IT in a constant—and chaotic—reactive mode, hurting IT’s credibility and reputation.
3. Reporting and communicating service levels—Most service-level reporting processes are manual, causing IT to spend an incredible amount of time piecemealing ad hoc reports together. This approach is error-prone and expensive, making it tough to provide the business with concrete facts into SLA compliance and communicate the business value of IT’s efforts.
4. Improving service levels—IT organizations today either have no way to capture and analyze historical IT service information, or they rely on manual processes that are time-consuming and generate inconsistent results. Organizations end up wasting efforts on improvements that aren’t sustained.

Gain value for both IT and business

The core strength of our Service Level Management solution lies in its ability to deliver metrics for  both IT and business audiences. With this unique combination, Vantage supplies the critical  aspects needed to manage service levels more proactively—and deliver the value the business demands. Vantage helps organizations:

“If you walk into an executive meeting and start showing charts of CPU utilization, you’re just going to distance yourself from the rest of the organization. But if you can walk in and say, ‘Business transactions are slowing down by 20 percent and we know why, and here’s what we want to do about it,’ then it’s a whole different conversation.”

-- Scott Grinna, director of IT administration, West Bend Mutual

“Compuware Vantage lets us know the level of service that is being provided to customers, in real time, and allows us to measure customer satisfaction levels, having real-time information on the quality of service enables us to be more flexible and to better respond to our business customers’ ever changing needs.”

-- Jon Greaves, Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technology Officer, Global Customer Services

Why Vantage Global and Fortune 1000 companies rely on Compuware Vantage to govern their service commitments and deliver IT service excellence to their end-users and the business—and, for good reasons. Our Service Level Management solution: comes fully integrated with End-user Experience Monitoring and Business Service Management provides a proactive and automated approach to SLA measurement and reporting delivers quality improvement with automated Six Sigma techniques and ITIL support recognized in the industry as a proven solution with global clients, including major service providers.

Improve customer relationships and trust

No longer does your organization need to wonder if SLAs are focused on the right aspects. While most service-level reporting processes are still manual and prone to error, Vantage helps IT organizations:

• baseline service quality to establish realistic, customer-focused SLAs
• drive more effective ongoing communication between IT and its business counterparts using business-relevant SLA metrics and shared dashboards and reports that display service quality from the end user’s perspective.

Enhance productivity and operational effectiveness

Without proactive monitoring of service-level compliance, IT teams are often left scrambling to  fix service issues. This reaction usually sets up a preconceived notion among users that IT service  is generally poor—even if you meet all of your SLAs. Vantage changes all this. It helps IT teams:

• automate service-level measurement and reporting
• detect breaches and alert the right technology groups—quickly addressing accountability issues and improving resolution time.
• proactively warn technology groups of service degradation before it impacts customers  and the business
• provide in-depth troubleshooting and diagnostic insight into application service for faster resolution of problems.

Increase service quality

With Vantage, you can make the process of capturing historical IT service information and manually analyzing the data into a thing of the past. Vantage provides:

• automated, proven Six Sigma techniques so IT teams can measure, analyze, improve and control service-level quality continually—all in line with ITIL v3’s Continual Service Improvement

White Papers Best Practice Series: Service Level Management Life Cycle Overview Fact Sheet Business-focused Service Level Management