In the third of four webcasts, ‘Rapid & Relevant SLAs: Integrating Service Catalog with Your Business’, attendees were asked about their organization’s awareness of SLAs and Service Catalog. In response, 44 per cent of those surveyed said that their organizations had ‘limited individual knowledge’ and only 5 per cent stated their organization had ‘extensive demonstrable skills and understanding of Service Catalog concepts’. This statistic demonstrates a lack of knowledge in what has been shown as a very important factor in improving efficiencies of an organization. It is important that the business, not just IT, be aware of how to best deploy their service provision if they are to be efficient and cost effective.
Another area participants were asked about was the reporting and metrics they currently carry out on their SLAs. The ‘number of calls resolved within the SLA’ and ‘open incidents per service’ were the two most popular at 87 and 75 per cent respectively. However, only 8 per cent of attendees reported on the ‘cost for the individual service’. This suggests that the majority of organizations aren’t aware of the cost involved in each service they provide, making it very difficult to assess importance and relevance of that service and, therefore, whether it is cost effective to have it in place. In addition, only half of the organizations linked their SLAs to their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), missing out on an opportunity to directly relate performance measures to service provision.
For increased efficiency, it is vital that an SLA process be clearly defined, documented and reviewed on a regular basis; however, only 13 per cent of organizations surveyed are actually doing this. 26 per cent said their SLA process was ‘clearly defined and documented’, but not reviewed and a further 13 per cent stated the process was ‘defined but not documented’. The most concerning figure was in the category of ‘process neither defined nor documented’, with 49 per cent of organizations selecting this option.
