By David England, Managing Consultant, Alsbridge, Inc.
Mike McGarry, Managing Consultant, Alsbridge, Inc.


When it comes to IT outsourcing, few organizations realize the full potential value of their sourcing partnership. Part of the problem is related to how the performance of a service is managed in a sourcing relationship. This becomes even more challenging when the responsibilities of the service support components (e.g., service desk support, application support, infrastructure support) are shared among multiple service providers.

Many organizations are utilizing the Information Technology Infrastructure Library V3 (ITIL V3) framework to create service level agreements (SLAs) that will eliminate ambiguity, avoid unnecessary IT service contracting expenses and improve the customer service experience.

For an organization to be able to effectively manage the performance of each service, it is important to understand the relationships and dependencies between a service, SLAs and underpinning service performance metrics. To assist organizations in driving overall service performance, Alsbridge has established a five-step approach for creating effective cross-functional SLAs.

The SLA becomes an important customer tool for communications, conflict resolution and gauging the effectiveness of an end-to-end IT service.

Since ITIL V3 publications provides a best-practice framework for creating, implementing and managing service level agreements, Alsbridge has integrated the framework into our FastSource methodology for establishing effective sourcing contracts.

Read about these five steps for achieving an effective SLA.