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Tech failing to meet business expectations
A quarter of service level agreements not met...

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Monday 23 June 2008

Tech teams are failing to meet around a quarter of service level agreements (SLAs) made with other business departments in their organisation.

Although four out of five (81 per cent) of businesses adopt formal SLAs, these are only met 74 per cent of the time, according to research carried out by Forrester Consulting.

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This failure of SLAs can result in poor performance for business applications within different business units.

More than half (57 per cent) of respondents said they've experienced increased costs as a result of poor application performance, while 48 per cent said they've lost revenue for the same reason.

Other effects of SLA failure cited by respondents include a negative effect on external customer satisfaction and a slowing of production.

According to Forrester, the failure of these SLAs demonstrates many business units have unrealistic expectations of the tech team, showing a "disconnect" between IT and business.

Forrester said one of the reasons for this mismatch is the use of metrics which focus on the tech rather than the business objectives.

The research showed 41 per cent of nearly 400 respondents only have a basic insight into service levels, while SLA information often fails to get sent on to execs regularly.

Jean-Pierre Garbani, principal analyst with Forrester Research, said the end user is the ultimate judge of IT and business alignment, so IT departments must check they are delivering on expectations in terms of accuracy, availability, performance and usability.

The research was commissioned by Compuware.