Published: May 28 2010, 04:10 AM | 2 Comment(s)
by Peter Doherty

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Have documented agreements with Business customers on the Services you offer them?
• Do you measure these in metrics the Business cares about?
• Do you monitor and report compliance back to the Business on these?

Where does your organisation fit in the curve and where would you like to be? I bet with each question, the percentage of organisations that answer with yes decreases exponentially!

Why? Because IT will continue to be viewed as a commodity if they continually show their ignorance of what is important to their customer (The Business). There will never be a true partnership if the partners do not share a common vision and set of goals as well as a common definition of what ‘value' is.

Service Level Management is one of the key disciplines for documenting and sharing the goals as well as recording achievement against those goals. But too often organisations allow this to slip away by documenting the goals in IT terms. That being said we have come a long way from where a Service Level was all about technology silos. We now talk about Service Availability as being the value proposition we (IT) offer to the Business and where there is little shared goals and vision this is also the customers idea of IT's value. If this is the customers idea of IT's value - IT is clearly a commodity!

If IT and the Business want to change that, SLM can bring the two much closer!

As a shared service provider IT needs to understand what it is that the Business values. Is it that the Claims Processing Service is available 99% of the time or do they have a business objective of writing 1000 new Claims contracts an hour, a day or a week? The only way for IT to understand that is to be sitting at the table when these business objectives are being discussed. The important part is to be sitting there listening and contributing. Once IT start understanding what is important to the business (yes availability is important, I am not making light of that) they can start working out which of these metrics they can readily report on. If they cannot currently report on the metric they need to ask how important it is and then work out how they can start that reporting.

Think about your organisation--is this the EXACT opposite of what you do? Do you work out what you can technically report on and then present that to the business? If so, don't feel bad, as you are not alone.

Now think, could some of these metrics actually be even further externalised to the Businesses customers to give the Business a competitive advantage? Could the outward facing revenue generating service be shown to be better than that offered by the Businesses competitors? Now THAT is integration with the Business. That is IT adding value to the Business! Once this happens IT is in a much better position to sit down and have Service value based costing discussions with the Business.