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Today's business calls for accountability. The best method to ensure someone meets specified goals, or at least provides the service agreed upon, is the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

An SLA is an important piece for IT meeting business needs. Your SLA should identify business priorities and required levels of service for different business functions (e.g., sales, delivery, ordering or invoicing). SLAs should require periodic reports for evaluating success or failure in meeting business needs.

Make sure your SLAs are easily understood by the business and are stated in terms that display the value of IT to the business. By doing so, Gartner, Inc. believes that CIOs can position IT as an essential element that directly contributes to the success of the business.

Your Reputation at Stake
Gartner, Inc. has also said that incorrect or nonexistent SLAs frequently lead to poor customer satisfaction, which results in misaligned relationships. The SLA sets the expectations between you and your customer.

When developing your SLA, take the following into account:

• Stating the promise
• Delivering on that promise
• Measuring the results
• Handling unmet expectations

Ensure you and your business partner agree on the promise.

Once the promise has been made, you’ll need to deliver on that promise through the measurements you both agree will help you achieve the desired results of your partnership.

To put it in business terms, you and your business partner may agree on availability levels. As an example, Company A's servers will be available 98 percent of the time during the operating hours of 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Sunday.

The promise and measurements are included in the above statement. Both parties should be involved in the measurement process and measurement must be an ongoing part of the process.

SLA Benefits
As a part of the Service Level Management in ITIL, SLAs impact your costs by contributing to the following:

• Improving customer satisfaction
• Increasing reliability, availability and predictability
• Improving customer relationships
• Improving service levels