Smarter Outsourcing: An executive guide to understanding, planning and exploiting successful outsourcing relationships

Controllable, not autonomous

Whether internal or external, the two key attributes of SLAs is that they should be controllable and that they should continue to reflect real business needs, rather than becoming a business activity in their own right.

This is not an easy balance to strike. Many clients confuse technical measurement with actual service levels. Instead we would argue that measurements – from basic system uptime all the way up to Six Sigma practices^[*] – are the basis for solid service levels. But they do not constitute service levels in themselves. At the same time it is very difficult to detach SLAs completely from the individual components (i.e. granularity) of the service they are measuring without making them irrelevant.

^[*] Six ...