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INDUSTRY NEWS


24 June 2008

IT Departments 'Failing on SLAs'


A survey of IT decision makers in Europe, the United States and China has revealed that IT departments are still failing to deliver on business needs.

According to research from Forrester, most organisations have adopted formal IT service level agreements (SLAs), but these are only met three quarters (74 percent) of the time.

The study, commissioned by Compuware, found that there is still not enough collaboration between IT and business, and that the use of IT-centric service level metrics are creating expectations that are unrealistic.

Some 47 percent of respondents also believed that service levels are being missed because application performance problems were never addressed, even if they were present from launch.

"The ultimate judge of IT and business alignment is the end user," said Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.

"If alignment is viewed as conformity to user expectations in terms of availability, performance, usability and accuracy, then monitoring end-user performance is the only way IT knows that it is meeting these expectations."

Earlier this year, attendees at the OutsourceWorld conference in London were told by experts that IT suppliers and clients can derive greater value from their SLAs by adopting flexible contracts, rather than simply working to meet rigid stipulations.<br/>

© 2006 Adfero Ltd.

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