Service Level Management
ITIL Service Management
According to ITIL, the goal of Service Level Management is to gradually improve business aligned IT service quality, through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring, reporting and reviewing IT service achievements and through instigating actions to eradicate unacceptable levels of service.
Service Level Management qualifies and quantifies customer expectations and the ability and preparedness of IT to deliver on those expectations. The resulting balance is formalized into a Service Level Agreement (SLA), the success of which can then be tracked and reviewed.
Service Level Management requires IT to put in place contractual arrangements with internal departments - Operational Level Agreements, and suppliers - Underpinning Contracts, in order to guarantee delivery on agreed SLAs.
Infra and Service Level Management
Infra Service Level Management's extensive capabilities empower IT to:
- Increase customer satisfaction through the effective communication of mutual expectations
- Prove successes and identify weaknesses in the Service Level Management strategy
- Promote the success of IT to customers backed up by quantifiable metrics
- Improve budget and resource efficiencies
- Continuously seek to improve levels of service.
Service Catalog and Other Processes
The Service Catalog is a menu of IT services. It describes features, components, charges etc and provides details of SLAs between the organization, its customers and suppliers.The Infra Service Catalog is accessed via the Customer Portal and provides customers with an end-to-end service view of the IT services available to an organization.
From the Service Catalog, internal and external customers can perform a number of tasks such as request a service, or report an Incident against the service. Customers can track requests for service and add additional information as it comes to hand.
For Business Managers, Service Level Management reports can be published to the Customer Portal, providing ease of access to performance information. In addition, availability of services can be tracked and their performance analyzed.
The Infra CMDB is defined around the Service Catalog, rather than around Configuration Items. This builds upon the ITIL service-centric view of IT infrastructure and allows users to:
- see all the services linked to any CMDB item
- assess the impact of an outage - the full impact upon both services and CMDB items is included
- graphically review links between services and other CMDB items
Reporting and Monitoring
In order to meet and exceed customer service delivery and support expectations, IT managers must be fully aware of how well they are responding to their agreed service commitments.
Infra provides web-based reports as part of the standard product that enable IT managers to measure when targets are met and, more importantly, when they are not.
Infra also provides the opportunity to intervene before a service breach occurs by delivering timely alerts to key stakeholders that allow them to take action to avoid a breach. This alert mechanism is fully integrated with other ITIL processes.
Supervisors are able to check the current status of Incidents against escalation and agreement breaches using the Infra Monitor, which shows graphical displays of Incident statuses in real-time. When combined with Infra's detailed Configuration Management Database and Reporting, the results are improved service delivery and lower costs through more efficient IT workflow processes.
Flexibility
Infra Service level Management can accommodate both simple business requirements, and complex requirements more typical of large multi-departmental organizations. Extensive selection criteria are available for locating and assigning agreements for certain scenarios. The generation of commitment time frames is also based on a range of key data such as priority, service type and Configuration Item type.
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