Whilst the role of IT as a service is now firmly entrenched in our minds, the ability to measure the quality of the service actually being delivered is still not clear. This report is aimed at helping organisations that need to take a service-oriented perspective.

It starts from the point where a business manager turns up in the IT-Director’s office and asks for a Service Level Agreement. It discusses the nature of SLAs and then how technology can be used firstly, to raise alerts when service levels are falling below expectations and, then, to diagnose the actual causes of any problems.

The provision of high levels of service has taken over from all the old issues that have been associated with Enterprise Systems Management. Whilst Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), Change Management and infrastructure management are still important requirements, the advent of e-commerce and mobile technologies has meant that the concept of the ‘end-user experience’ has become more important.

The problem that has arisen for managers in this highly distributed world is that the ownership of the communications cloud is, by and large, outside of their jurisdiction. At the same time, it takes only a small degradation in quality of service for the users to abandon their applications completely. The business needs to know when users are experiencing poor levels of service so that it can identify the problems and resolve them.

The Service Management Report will provide organisations with the opportunity to discover what is measurable and, therefore, should be included within an SLA. It identifies methods of automating management functions and it provides the links between identifying service delivery problems in the highly distributed environment to the tools for diagnosis.

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