| Guarantee Service Quality through Win-Win Service Level Agreements
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define expectations among two or more
parties regarding service quality, priorities, and responsibilities.
While SLAs have traditionally been a contract between a Service Provider
and an Enterprise customer, the expanding value chain for
new-generation services has made SLAs important for a myriad of
partnerships, including:
- Service Provider to End User
- Service Provider to Vendor
- Service Provider to Enterprise (e.g., a large business or an MVNO)
- Enterprise to End User
- Service Provider to Enterprise (i.e., an MVNO)
- Network Provider to Service Provider (e.g., i.e., a network access provider)
- Vendor to Network Provider, Service Provider, or Enterprise
- Content Provider to Content Aggregator or Advertiser
To compete successfully, companies must proactively manage the quality
of their services. Since provisioning of those services is dependent on
multiple partners, management of partner services SLAs become critical
for success. SLAs are used to define and manage expectations among
partners for performance, customer care, billing, service provisioning,
and other business areas.
SLA Management can also be used to assess predefined penalties when SLA
parameters, such as failure to meet performance, timeline, or cost
requirements, are not met. For example, if network downtime exceeds one
hour, the penalty is a 10 percent rebate of service fees.
Business Benefits
- Improve and differentiate services by defining performance and its measures
- Build actionable performance tracking and controls
- Strengthen compliance to ITIL®, Sarbanes-Oxley, Six Sigma, and COBIT
- Produce a common language for characterizing network and operational parameters
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