IT organisations are expected to demonstrate how business processes are truly performing and delivering measurable business value. But that requires visibility into business processes because:
- You can’t manage what you can’t measure
- Things that are measured get done
- You can’t improve what you can’t measure
Metrics as business drivers: SLAs
Enter service level agreements, or SLAs. By definition, SLAs capture the agreed-upon guarantees between service providers and their customers. But they can also provide much greater value if guarantees are consistently met.
Best-in-class organisations achieve 92 percent of their SLA goals, according to The Aberdeen Group’s December 2007 benchmark report, “Strong SLA Management causes increased customer satisfaction.”
“The first step in creating your SLA goals is to determine the levels of service that your organisation and customers require,” says Rebecca Lawson, director of service management for HP Software. “Then, balance these requirements with IT capabilities.”
SLAs provide a way to manage the customer experience successfully and differentiate service levels according to pre-established agreements. Effective SLA management shows the IT infrastructure components on which a service relies, which customers are receiving the service, and who is managing and supporting the service.
Lawson says, “The HP Service Management solution lets the IT organisation streamline IT service processes and manage the IT service lifecycle through comprehensive service level management capabilities. By managing SLAs, it seamlessly brings together operational management and customer management.”
Adapting to business change: KPIs
But the information from SLAs alone doesn’t provide a complete picture. Metrics known as key performance indicators, or KPIs, evaluate performance against measurable SLA goals to determine which processes have the greatest business impact. Service providers can readily set new thresholds and acceptable deviations, while users can define new KPI rules to detect such events as abnormal usage or weekly new subscribers.
These metrics can help organisations adapt to the breakneck pace of business change. Precise, up-to-date information is essential to identify:
- Deviations from your business plans
- Bottlenecks that impact your business
- Sources of problems
Any changes made to IT infrastructure and services can dramatically affect business processes. Unless you clearly understand the problems and potential obstacles, you cannot determine what action to take for success. You need to:
- Control processes to execute changes flawlessly
- Understand the business impact of an outage
- Maintain service availability and service performance to agreed upon SLAs
More than ever, IT organisations must manage operational and financial performance against established strategy, metrics, goals and key performance indicators.
By tying business impact analytics to IT performance analytics using KPIs, IT can not only analyse the business impact of historical availability for a precise understanding on how SLA goals were met, but IT decision-makers can see where critical needs were not achieved. IT can then see, for example, which departments are most affected by service delivery and which services affect the corporate bottom line.
Metrics deliver for the business
IT must be able react quickly to restore service with minimal impact, prioritise fixes and resources based on real need and improve critical processes to synchronise business strategy and execution.
The use of SLAs and KPIs address this critical business need, allowing better visibility across the organisation to improve critical processes, reduce costly errors, increase revenue and improve customer service. Critical processes are modelled, linking business and IT.
By drilling deeper into the root cause, you can better anticipate problems and manage business processes efficiently.
How to get started
1. Define the problem and select the appropriate metrics
2. Obtain organisational buy-in
3. Build the right processes
4. Communicate the plan
5. Document performance and successes in real time
6. Track performance against measurable goals on a regular basis |
|
 |
|
Printable version
