SERVICE - Support at their fingertips

Wrangles with clients over service level agreements are enough to send a reseller right over the edge.

Almost anyone in the industry who has entered into a service levelsend a reseller right over the edge. agreement (SLA) has an opinion about it. At one end of the spectrum are the dealers, often perceived by customers as on a par with Peckham's Trotter clan and resisting any compensation claims with the familiar mantra of 'no money back, no guarantee'.

At the other end are IT managers and their lawyers, waving their big sticks over hapless suppliers even when the original spec is so much in need of updating that it has ceased to be relevant.

The trouble is that SLAs are impossible to live with and even more impossible to exist without.

Customers, quite rightly, demand that when it comes to service fulfilment the contract price is vindicated and justice should be seen to be done. That invariably means benchmarking.

For resellers, the nit-picking that often accompanies SLAs can lead to pointless rifts with the customer and, worse still, negate their contribution to the client organisation's performance.

In the public sector, the last Conservative government went some way towards redressing this problem with its private finance initiative, which sought to make IT suppliers more accountable for meeting project or service targets, if only on the basis that they would not be paid until the contract terms had been visibly met. The current government's Best Value initiative is in much the same vein.

The problem is that while a solitary migration project can be signed off as complete or otherwise, allowing the supplier to be paid in full or recompensed on a facility lease-back arrangement, SLAs elsewhere tend to relate to perpetual commitments such as the provision of a PC help desk or an outsourced customer call centre.

Customer relationships is an area that even the biggest suppliers have trouble getting right. One of the most recent disputes, on which the dust has still to settle, is the rift between EDS and Wandsworth council in south London over the US consultancy's alleged inability to meet its service level agreements on aspects of a #16.6 million data management contract (PC Dealer, 16 September). Not far away, Kingston council is also rumoured to have fallen out with the former Ross Perot outfit over work backlogs on a #6.6 million council tax and housing benefits project.

Behind the scenes, it has been suggested that EDS is no longer interested in the local government services market. If this is true - and EDS is certainly not admitting it - it begs the question why.

It could be that red tape and public sector bureaucracy meet their heaven in SLAs, even if they create hell for suppliers. One possible solution could be agreement metrics that focus more on overall customer business performance - perhaps measured in a network's percentage availability - rather than the time it takes for a contracted engineer to open his toolbox.

Quite understandably, a significant sector of the channel would prefer to opt for agreements that reflect overall performance, if only because it's easier to quantify. The bad news is that corporate customers at least still prefer the old benchmarks.

Evidence of this comes from market analyst firm Input, whose recent survey of 300 large UK firms revealed that IT managers prefer the tried and tested performance metrics.

Topping the list of benchmarks is the time taken by contractors to repair a faulty machine or application, cited as a vital yardstick by 67 per cent of respondents. Other factors included network availability, cited by half the respondents, and individual availability and responsiveness of server-based programs.

According to Input's Jamie Snowdon - who conducted the research - the fashion among suppliers such as Hewlett Packard and Digital to boast reliability of their hardware or architectures - that is, guaranteeing 99.9 per cent availability - is seen as too esoteric by customers.

'In the real world, corporate users just aren't experiencing these much-vaunted availability or reliability levels,' says Snowdon. 'People who rely on these machines day in, day out are often highly sceptical of such reassurances and don't see that they have any meaningful place in a service level agreement.'

Snowdon adds that one of the best ways to alienate corporate customers is to let them see that support staff lack knowledge of their business goals and are too overworked and stressed themselves to be unduly concerned with the needs of their clients.

This is where, in theory, performance metrics in SLA should help sort the wheat from the chaff. But, says Snowdon, while IT managers might insist on hair-splitting detail in their service contracts, they can be equally inclined to take such measurements with a pinch of salt.

'It's all down to interpretation,' he says. 'A help desk might have an excellent pick-up rate statistically, but users might be so cynical about the value of the help desk that they rarely bother to phone it - guaranteeing that the odd user who does bother will get through quickly.'

Elsewhere, he says, there is a growing consensus that different SLA models are needed, which provide both sides with some common acceptance of performance measurement.

Earlier this year, another survey of the top 2,000 UK firms - this time on behalf of service management specialist Tertio - found that IT departments remain deeply concerned about the effectiveness of SLAs, even though more than half the firms canvassed made use of them and anticipated their adoption would grow by a fifth between now and the next millennium.

But the problem was not so much with the supplier as with the IT departments which, when drawing up the agreements, rarely bothered to consult the people in their organisation responsible for overall business objectives.

One upshot was that the non-IT factions of the company had higher expectations of what could be delivered by computer infrastructures, expectations not often matched in the original service agreements with the supplier.

Result? A gradual moving of the service goal posts by the customer, leading to a clash over higher charges from suppliers and a further fracas when the bills finally surface in the corporate accounts.

As Alan Greenberg, director of Tertio, points out: 'Too often, SLAs are written in terms of what they can monitor and measure. The information tends to be component-based, for example the availability of a router or a hub, although what is really needed is some kind of measure of how that component has an impact on overall levels of business.'

Another thing that didn't help matters, found Tertio, was that most SLAs were re-evaluated on a yearly rather than an ongoing basis, while one in seven top firms didn't even have personnel dedicated specifically to monitoring service agreements.

Over at RMS Services, a division of the Knowledge Group that specialises in help desk and developing tools for supporting SLAs, the findings come as little surprise.

Graham Pitts-Drake, managing director of RMS, says: 'What is clear is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for the channel to comply with SLAs. Not only are customers more demanding, but as desktop technology becomes more complex, the problems with servicing it increase accordingly.'

He adds: 'Suppliers of desktop systems also have the problem that they can't exercise control over who will ultimately be using their kit. If it's an idiot who has never used a computer in his life then he'll probably be ringing the help desk every five minutes.'

On the networking front especially, this concern has been given even more relevance by the internet and the accompanying bandwidth and availability problems. The Network Outsourcing Association recently went as far as condemning SLAs as a waste of time, if only because they rarely provided users with what they needed in terms of guaranteed support.

It's a view heartily endorsed by Ian Kilpatrick, head of network distributor Wick Hill Group, who is among those pushing for a different kind of contract based not so much on network-centric measurements but on how well business needs are satisfied.

'Typically, users aren't interested in technical measures of network performance,' says Kilpatrick. 'They just want to carry out their responsibilities with fast, easy access to all the tools and data they need.'

If SLAs are to reflect this, they too must evolve - perhaps using latest generation measurement tools such as TCP/IP, Microsoft and Intel standards as a preliminary benchmark, which can ascertain what a system delivers to the individual rather than company-wide. The approach can be documented in fresh service agreements.

Explains Kilpatrick: 'A common criterion is network availability. But even 99.5 per cent availability can mean 0.5 per cent downtime, or 50 minutes per week. The service provider's perception might be of target levels achieved, but the users' perception - especially if they've been trying to use the system for an hour - is of failure.'

But new generation tools can't vouchsafe against the unexpected, such as customers meddling with a network. Kieron Doyle, managing director of Hampshire Business Computers, says: 'The problem with SLAs is not so much what they can cover but what they can't. Half the time, customers don't really know what they want and when they do, they might settle for something less in order to reduce costs.

'We've not had many fall-outs. Where they have occurred, they have been in cases where, for instance, a customer has reconfigured the software when the SLA forbids meddling. The problem is passed on to the dealer to sort out and when the extra charges go in, the fur starts to fly.'

He adds: 'We don't want to lose any maintenance contract because it's usually regular, long-term income. But sometimes you have to draw the line.'

Anthony Miller, an analyst at research company Richard Holway, believes the best approach for both sides is to enter any agreement in a spirit of 'partnership'.

'If the maintenance agreement is drawn up along the lines of how many widgets will be shifted in a given number of hours, it's likely the contract has been ill-thought out in the first place,' he says.

'Partnership is a terrible cliche. But if a company is handing over a significant chunk of its business to a supplier, it can't draw up an SLA and leave it there - there's too much at stake. It should be a contract that reflects shared risks and rewards, otherwise it can be a marriage made in hell.'