Service Levels
All IT and communications service providers must operate with a service orientation in order to survive and thrive in a competitive marketplace:
- Managed services are often tied to meeting contractually defined service levels.
- Providers operate in extreme competition where customer switching costs are dropping.
- Incentive plans for operations staff are often tied to service levels.
- Internal IT groups are held to demanding SLAs and chargeback models.
- Virtual network operators repackage provider services, but still must commit to service levels.
How does Windward Help?
Holistic service level management encompasses the entire service lifecycle from planning to billing. Windward can help your organization through each of these stages to ensure that you and your customers know the availability, quality and price of your IT services. This transparency builds customer trust and trust results in loyal customers.
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“SLAs are useless unless we can define relevant metrics and can accurately monitor them.” |
With experience in active, passive and intrusive technologies to monitor and measure the delivery of services, Windward tailors a solution that fits the need. |
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“Service oriented management requires a sense of urgency, but I don’t feel that all of our people are on this same page.” |
Windward delivers training and workshops on ITIL IT services management that help your people understand what service management means to their day to day job. |
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“We have drafted tentative SLAs but fear that our management processes are not oriented around the delivery of SLAs.” |
Many organizations have committed to SLAs, but put less than an integrated effort to deliver on them. Windward’s analyzes SLA metrics and recommends specific process, organizational or technology changes to support committed service levels. |
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“Our staff spends hours compiling weekly or monthly service level reports that aggregates data across performance, service desk and monitoring systems.” |
With reporting solutions or custom visualization solutions, Windward automates the collection, analysis and web-based reporting of service levels. |
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“We have not been able to document and publish our technology services.” |
Windward analysts help clients construct well defined services within a service catalog. Windward then works with leading software packages to document and publish services, and integrate with order management and provisioning systems. |
What is the Windward Solution?
The most mature IT organizations proactively manage their IT infrastructure, orient their activities towards delivering and supporting services, and are maturing to become a partner involved in planning and enabling the business. This migration up the IT operations maturity model occurs incrementally in a continuous improvement cycle. To achieve effective service level management, leading IT service providers must put in place these key capabilities:
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Service planning process to develop SLAs that support customer objectives.
- Service Catalog in electronic form to support documentation of services.
- Order management and service provisioning solution that supports established service levels.
- ITSM processes that are focused on delivery of service levels.
- Management of OLAs and UCs that support delivery of service level objectives.
- Monitoring systems that focus on service impacting performance and problems.
- Service level reporting to internal stakeholders and customers.
Some Leading Software Packages:
Services Catalog:
- BMC Remedy SLM
- CA Unicenter Service Catalog
- SugarCRM
Service Monitoring and Reporting:
- InfoVista
- Digital Fuel
- Oblicore
- Integrien
- Optier
- IBM Tivoli Business Service Management
- CA Unicenter Service Metric Analysis
Service Provisioning and Activation:
- Amdocs Cramer
- Visionael
- HP Opsware SAS/NAS
- EMC Voyence
- Bladelogic