Oblicore - Service Level Management

Notes from the public (registration required)online seminar 16 December 2009, 11:00 AM EST:

Deming (father of quality control) - Plan, Do, Check (measure), Act

SLA can mean many things - ITIL, ERP, CRM, COBiT - folks think they are talking about the same things but meaning varies, depending on where they are in the organization.

"When you have no destination - Every road leads nowhere". You need to align business needs with targets.

- An SLA is a contract between a provider and a customer. Service Level Agreement, Operational Level Agreement, Underpinning Contract. They all document targets and specifies responsibilities of the parties.

- SLM -- ITIL Service Level Management. Tells you what to do (but necessarily how to do it)
- Define, document, agree, monitor, measure, report and review the level of IT services provided.

Most companies manage SLAs manually. Each contract negotiated separately. Labor intensive data collection. Reporting is reactive.

- Establish - Implement - Manage - Review:

Service Improvement Plan: Define Strategy, Planning, Implementation, Catalog Services, Draft, Negotiate, Review SLAs SCs and OLAs, Agree, measure and monitor, Report, Review SLM process, Review SLAs SCs and OLAs (back to start of loop).

( lots about roles for the above steps...)

- Standardizing Contract Creation and Revision - Data collection and metrics need to be uniform.
-- most SLAs require multiple data sources. Need to aggregate the data, apply exceptions (TOD, external events), correlations with other incidents.

(more on types of pain when a robust process for SLA management is absent)

Oblicore does the last mile to drive an automated ITIL approach, via a double closed-loop process. (Geeze - this is buzzword heavy!).

(demo of Oblicore Guarantee) UI is browser-based, multiple tabs. Basically workflow management with a federated view of multiple metrics, over a various web-based forms. following the ITIL model. Generates paper! But somebody has to sign this stuff - so, way better than excel... They use adapters to bring in various metrics. Looks like an ETL transform (Table/Field assignment). Don't know how real-time this could be.