5 tips to improve ITSM SLAs in IT shops with multiple service providers

The service integrator (SI) role should be defined The SI should perform specific and targeted service management activities. For example, as each tower service provider has its own methods of collecting and reporting on service performance, the service integrator needs to specify a common integration capability. SIs also collaborate with the tower service providers to audit data that is being used to report performance and influence service performance improvement actions. By staying up to date on customer organization strategies, they act as a trusted advisor, suggesting how industry trends may improve the service delivery and performance.

Other roles of the SI include proposing changes to ITSM SLAs to ensure that they properly reflect business needs while balancing cost, proactively analyzing opportunities to improve performance levels, troubleshooting performance issues and resolving problems that span across tower service providers. Additionally, the SI regularly identifies opportunities for innovation, discussing these opportunities with the retained IT organization during governance meetings, consolidating opportunities for improvement and innovation from service tower providers, and coordinating impact assessments in order to deliver on these opportunities.

To strengthen an enterprise’s IT service supply chain, it is critical to approach ITSM SLAs through the lens of the business need. This means mapping the business service landscape including service dependencies, identifying the criticality of those services to the business and maintaining a view of the associated service performance and trends. IT organizations should also triage ITSM SLAs and OLAs to ensure the right focus is placed on addressing identified issues and confirm a defined service management capability to maintain a strong integration of their multiple service providers and aggregation of service data.