Service Level Management
To be effective SLA’s (Service level Agreements) need to be monitored and measured. The ITIL states:”Nothing should be included in an SLA unless it can be effectively monitored and measured at a commonly agreed point. The importance of this cannot be overstressed, as inclusions of items that cannot be effectively monitored almost always result in disputes and eventual loss of faith in the SLA process.”
This level of information provides benefits such as:
- Quality of services and experience.
- IT service continuity procedures become more focused.
- A clearer view of current IT capacity.
- Better information on current services.
- Greater flexibility for the business through improved understanding of IT support.
- Enhanced customer satisfaction.
- Improvements in security.
Financial and Management of IT Services
IT Compliance
Capacity Management
- What assets have we got?
- What is our resource utilisation prediction for next year of even the next five years?
- What is the variation between actual and forecasted capacity.
Being Pro-active
- Initial Stage; companies create, through processes and tools, a correct database of all assets and devices.
- Second Stage; the complete asset life cycle is captured from procurement to disposal.
- Third Stage; this area is all about pro-actively using the management information available to enable effective decision making.
According to this article 60% of companies are still at the initial stage, 30% at the second stage with less than 10% of companies able to perform pro-active asset management.
Companies that strive to undertake pro-active asset and configuration management need more than just simple analysis for a given point in time, they need to compare actual versus expected expenses over time, asset retirement tracking analysis, software compliance/license expense optimization, contract expiration forecasting, and cost distribution over geographical boundaries and activities.
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