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Service-level agreements (SLAs) are a minor consideration in most IT departments, if they are considered at all, according to a recent survey of nearly 300 IT professionals, conducted by Stratus Technologies and the Information Technology Industry Council. This apparent indifference to SLAs comes at a time when more revenue-producing processes in more industries depend on the ability of their IT systems and applications to achieve higher levels of reliability and uptime, the survey noted.
Forty-three percent of the companies surveyed said they regularly review SLAs, while 46 percent reported that they don't review them at all. The remaining 11 percent didn't know whether they did or not.
The survey also found a pattern of high expectations, sketchy enforcement and limited executive understanding of the importance of SLAs:
· Forty-four percent of companies surveyed "hold IT accountable for defined performance metrics," 31 percent do "when something goes wrong," 19 percent don't define performance metrics and 9 percent don't do anything;
· 21 percent don't measure infrastructure performance management, and only 5 percent use client SLAs as the measurement device;
· More than half (52 percent) use unplanned downtime or a specific subset of IT systems as their barometer, but 51 percent said they don't know how much downtime costs; and
· Only 16 percent of companies surveyed have collaboration between top executives and IT managers on internal and external SLA metrics.
"When you step back from all the details, the survey reveals a huge need for executive leadership on service levels," said Peter Flynn, Stratus vice president, worldwide customer services. "Whether IT is servicing internal or external customers or both, the whole company has to be geared toward defining optimal performance, settling on the metrics to measure it, then appropriating the resources to support it. Availability is discipline, not a feature; it becomes a part of corporate culture, like quality does in the best firms."
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