Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Ensuring that SLAs are worthwhile

How IT organizations can successfully offer internal SLAs
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Ensuring that SLAs are worthwhile

Steve Taylor By Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler
There is a lot of buzz in the industry right now indicating that IT organizations should offer internal service-level agreements. In most cases, this buzz skips right over most, if not all of the challenges associated with that task. This newsletter is the next installment in a series of newsletters that is focusing on how IT organizations can successfully offer internal SLAs. Read full story

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.

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Establishing SLAs for key applications The last newsletter highlighted the fact that the dialogue at Network World’s recent IT Roadmap conference in Denver emphasized that the challenging economic environment puts pressure on IT organizations to focus even more than they do in normal economic times. With that in mind, this newsletter will begin to outline a process that IT organizations should follow in order to focus on a handful of key applications.

Are SLAs worthwhile? The last newsletter discussed the fact that the conventional wisdom in our industry is that IT organizations need to offer service-level agreements internally within their company. That newsletter also pointed out that in many cases the SLAs IT organizations get from their WAN service providers are not that impactful and raised the question of what should IT organizations do differently to ensure that their internal SLAs are impactful. This newsletter will provide a part of the answer to that question./p>

Managing BUM expectations The last newsletter discussed the fact that the conventional wisdom in our industry is that IT organizations need to offer SLAs internally within their company. That newsletter also pointed out that in many cases the SLAs that IT organizations get from their WAN service providers are not that impactful and raised the question of what should IT organizations do differently to ensure that their internal SLAs are impactful. This newsletter will provide a part of the answer to that question.

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03/31/09

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