Service Level Management

Service quality is extremely important, given the accelerating number of critical business processes going online. Customers and business partners go elsewhere if the services they want are not available or are performing sluggishly. Unfortunately, good service quality is a dynamic target and the demands continue to tighten. Competitors will match or exceed service quality levels and create pressure toward matching or bettering theirs.

Service Level Management (SLM) is the process of managing network and computing resources to ensure the delivery of acceptable service quality at an acceptable price in an acceptable time frame. It focuses on the behavior of the services rather than on tracking the status of every router, switch, and server in the environment. Through SLM, service quality is guaranteed and priced for different levels of service.

SLM is a competitive weapon in the marketplace, offering the guarantees needed to transition critical business activities online. Poorly managed services have harmed many businesses when their web sites crashed, their applications slowed to a crawl, or their Web content was not attractively presented or was too difficult to navigate. Good service quality helps retain customers and differentiate your organization from those that have not yet mastered the art of managing service quality.

Effective SLM is also an economic weapon. Managing resources more effectively reduces costs, creates more revenue opportunities, and leverages technology investments.

Finally, SLM is a means to build the solid business relationships that make online business initiatives successful.

The basic terminology of SLM is as follows:

• Service Level Agreement (SLA) A formal, negotiated contract between a service provider and a service user that defines the services to be provided, the service quality goals (often called service level indicators and service level objectives), and the actions to be taken if the service provider does not comply with the SLA terms.

• Quality of Service (QoS) A technology-centered concept that focuses on the performance of the transport and service technologies underlying a webbed service. Examples are service availability, response time, and the technologies that measure and assure specific levels of transport infrastructure performance (packet loss, network transit time, and transit time variations).

• Quality of Experience (QoE) A customer-centered concept that focuses on monitoring and assessing service quality from the end-customer perspective. This includes someone using a browser to access information and order merchandise, or a business conducting a series of exchanges to order products, negotiate terms, and arrange payment.

QoE is the most important to customers, yet it is also the most difficult to evaluate. For example, I recently visited a large company that derives over half its revenues online. They were justly proud of a new initiative that reduced web page download times by two seconds. However, the content was so dense and difficult to navigate that users still needed a long time to understand the directions and identify the buttons or links they wanted to use next. Improved technical performance did not appreciably raise the QoE in this case; users wasted at least two seconds looking for what they wanted.