Implementation of service level management

A great first step is to develop a service catalogue. The catalogue is a written statement of IT services, their default service levels and any options that attach to the services. Many IT organizations, when first attempting this task, are often surprised at the wide variety of services, service levels and option that exist. Developing the service catalogue presents a great opportunity for the IT organization to rationalize, standardize and consolidate the service provides. This can significantly reduce the management and support overheads the organization has.

The next step in implementation is to identify which customers use what services. When this is done a Service Level agreement (SLA) structure can be created. SLA agreements can be service based, where a standard agreement is developed for each service provided and customers can select which services they want,

or customer based, where you have a single agreement with each customer that includes all of the services they use.
Agreement can also be multi-tiered, which is a combination. The key is to decide what service should be standard across all customers and what services should be tailored to meet the specific needs of each customer. For ease of management, the Help Desk or Support component of any service Levels should be common across all customers, although some customers or services may attract a premium level of service, this should be exception based. Typically, business specific applications may attract varying service level in terms of transaction response times, throughput, hours of service etc. However, where possible, it would be preferred if applications could be grouped into services types or tiers.