- The Importance of Service Management
- Step 1: Define Your IT Services
- Step 2: Define Your IT Service Levels
- Step 3: Identify IT Growth Projections
- Step 4: Identify Critical IT Assets
- Step 5: Identify IT Opportunities and Risks
- Step 6: Establish IT Control and Design Objectives
- Next Steps
- Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute
Step 2: Define Your IT Service Levels
With well-defined service levels, the next step is describing and quantifying expectations for the services that your IT organization provides to its customers. You also need to define service levels that your vendors provide to your IT organization. The main objective is to set specific targets to evaluate performance and provide a foundation to define formal agreements for and the quality of service. Without appropriate performance measurements, your IT organization may not be able to provide acceptable levels of service. For example, IT service levels should cover items such as these:
Hours of operation (such as 24x7 support)
Connectivity (redundant network connections)
Availability (99.99 percent uptime, for example)
Capacity
Accessibility
Backup and restore
Disaster recovery
Call response
Problem management