SLA Trap

Whether an organization provides support internally or outsources it, service level agreements are an important base measure of the effectiveness of support. If employees’ technology problems are not being solved—if their laptops aren’t being repaired when they need them or their questions aren’t being adequately answered, for example—they won’t be able to perform their jobs. But SLAs generally are too limited to transactions between the support staff and users. They don’t encourage support staff to see past the immediate technology problem and look for ways that IT can help users do their jobs better.

Furthermore, SLAs are often out of date a few months after they’re established. For instance, in a company that successfully institutes a customer relationship management system, sales and customer service professionals will see their dependence on technology increase rapidly. Salespeople who become dependent on the system to prepare for each day’s sales calls won’t tolerate the 24-hour response time defined in the SLA if their laptops aren’t working. Other users who become more dependent on their technology will add to the pressure to go beyond what was is stipulated in an SLA. In other words, SLAs are becoming less effective as the only tools for ensuring that user needs are met because technology’s importance to users is accelerating in many organizations (although unevenly from function to function).

In short, while SLAs are necessary to provide a base level of metrics against which the IT support function must perform, sole reliance on SLAs is likely to create unhappy and, at times, unproductive users