The real meaning of the service level agreement

In today’s context, however, the SLA is mostly used as a get out of jail free card: as a limitation on service expectations by DP people; as a critical element in getting an easy ride from the auditors by both DP executives and the senior people they report to; and, as barrier keeping DP people in a distant and clearly subordinate role by executive management.

Basically the problem is that an SLA commits DP to meeting specified expectations – and thus both relieves DP of any need to exceed those expectations and acts as a barrier separating those on each side of the agreement. As a result its existence in an organization testifies to that organization’s ability to resist change by passing costs on its customers – meaning that its existence is characteristic of government and monopoly, or near monopoly, organizations; including industry level IT monopolies in which the employers compete but all use the same, essentially interchangeable, IT people, tools, and methods.

Those of us who went through the old DP training here at UT have always resisted SLA’s precisely because they feel like an unnatural barrier between us and the people we’re supposed to work with. We prefer to view “users” as colleagues rather than customers.

The more dangerous alternative is to go after real change now – but that’s extremely hard to do largely because you’ve got to pull off two miracles at once: change senior management perceptions, and change the way IT is run.

At the senior management level you’ll be dealing with people who mostly don’t want to hear it: and getting them to first internalize the reality that IT provides the organization’s “nervous system” and isn’t an arms length expense center at all, and then accept that DP’s relatively poor performance, organizational isolation, and freedom to escalate project costs have historically been due to the SLA centric management processes in place, is usually more of a challenge than most of us can handle.

We have a rather different history here, but I do get the feeling that a lot of senior management don’t want to hear about IT issues.