Recently, I’ve found a Forrester report – ‘Managing IT Services From The Outside In – Establishing Realistic SLAs To Stabilize The Business Relationship’. 389 IT decision-makers were asked about their service management process (how they created SLA, and how they measured quality of IT services). Here are some interesting facts from this report (and my thoughts also).
81% of organizations have formally defined SLA. But the SLA parameters are met only 74% of the time (so IT shops comply with SLA only for 60% of the time). It is interesting that the main reason for not meeting the SLA by IT is that…IT cannnot come to agreement with business. That is strange for me, because the issue has been risen for years, and can be felt strongly in everyday life. Despite all these articles, books, methodologies, etc. it is still a serious problem (There was a time I’d had enough of listening or reading about the lack of alignment of IT and business – this topic seemed very trite to me, however, it is actually a serious problem).
Lack of understanding between IT and business can be seen, for instance, in the way SLA are measured by IT, SLA parameters are still mainly technical, it is rare to measure parameters directly interesting for business. IT Departments do not have either appropriate tools to generate SLA reports, in 48% of cases it is still cumbersome, manual work.
Fortunately, we can see that IT shops are committed to makeing an improvement; usually it is done with process improvement programs for the entire company (Six Sigma and Balanced Scorecard). ITIL (recommended by Forrester) took the third place, COBIT – the fourth.
To sum up, in the field of IT service management, many things remain to be done and this is despite the fact that collections of best practices such as ITIL have been available for many years. Unfortunately, IT and business are still in many cases unable to reach an agreement. But for sure, it is going to be better.
The full report is available here (has also raised the issue of monitoring End-User Experience)
More interesting links you can find below.
Where did you get your blog layout from? I’d like to get one like it for my blog.
Please look at http://www.blogohblog.com/wordpress-theme-pop-blue/
it’s called “popblue”
Brak porozumienia pomiędzy IT i biznesem wynika według mnie ze sporej różnicy pomiędzy świetnymi osobami z IT i świetnymi biznesmenami. Ludzie IT to głównie umysły analityczne, ścisłe, natomiast ludzie biznesu to zwykle osoby nakierowane na efektywną komunikację i tzw. “big picture”. Młode pokolenie menedżerów wychowywanych w internecie, powoli to zmienia – wykorzystując osiągnięcia IT w coraz większym stopniu do robienia biznesu. Enterprise 2.0 wciąż jeszcze raczkuje, jednak może być to rewolucja conajmniej na miarę Web 2.0.