Scenario task 7 - Define agreements

Unlike the external facing business services, internal business services are not as closely monitored as they should be. Executive management recognizes this as a big problem because some key services depend on other services to provide efficient communication between teams within the company. Several critical email service events have taken place in the past, resulting in missed revenue opportunities and delays in important information exchange to IT management.

Calbro understands that the counterpart to their business service SLAs is a series of dedicated agreements defined between the business and service suppliers. Agreements with internal service suppliers, such as an IT department, are called operational level agreements (OLAs), whereas agreements with external or third party service suppliers are called underpinning contracts (UCs). Calbro's business owners currently have an arrangement with their IT department that allows them to effectively manage any external service suppliers. This strategy frees the business owners from having to negotiate with, and track, the individual service suppliers. While this setup puts most of the burden on the IT department, it also allows IT to provide more value back to the business. The benefit to the business owners is that they only have to deal with the IT department when an issue arises.

As displayed in the following figure, SLAs, along with their respective OLAs and UCs, form the end-to-end agreements of a business service and are grouped under the umbrella of a contract.

The following figure shows the Calbro agreement structure:

The Calbro business relationship managers and service owners have taken the service expectations and formatted this information into agreements. The following table represents a phased approach to deploying agreements, complying with top-down service level management methodology. The first phase of agreements addresses the most important service offerings focusing on those expectations deemed the most critical to the user community and service suppliers. Notice that the agreements are stated in business terms that identify what will be measured. As part of the negotiation process, these agreements are provided to the IT department and service suppliers to formulate how the measurements are to be carried out, along with a cost associated with delivering the stated level of compliance.

The following table shows the Calbro service offerings:
Calbro existing agreements

Where to go from here

Scenario-task-8-Assign-service-level-management-roles-to-IT-staff