Grabbing the bull by the SLAs and KPIs

Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog

Every enterprise business wrestles with the momentous task of service management and the ultimate goal of continuously improving customer experience and application user satisfaction levels, while also controlling escalating IT costs. Your adherence to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) will play a crucial role in your success here – think of them as the horns of the service management bull.

Don’t be afraid to grab the bull by the horns

Some of the specific ways in which SLAs and KPIs play such a critical role in service management include their ability to:

Introduce objectivity in service delivery measurements: In the absence of SLAs and KPIs, it’s very difficult to objectively measure client expectations and desired service delivery levels
Understand customers’ requirements well: The process of creating SLAs and KPIs forces service providers and customers to engage on a deeper level
Improve customer satisfaction levels: The process of crafting SLAs and KPIs firstly helps customers reflect on what their goals are – we’ve seen many instances where they lack clarity on what their needs really are!
Promote professionalism for service providers: A service provider who serves customers on the basis of SLAs and KPIs will always come across as being more professional than one who prefers to fly blindly.

Some of the best practices for SLAs and KPIs that you can incorporate into your service management include:

Specificity: Ideally, there should be SLAs and KPIs for every service that you provide. With heightened specificity, you can figure out where exactly clients are performing well, and where exactly they need to up their game
Objectivity: This regards metrics that service delivery is measured against and developing truly measurable metrics for this purpose
Realism: The metrics used in SLAs and KPIs should be truly realistic. The temptation to overpromise can be very strong, but ultimately, SLAs and KPIs should be based on what is actually deliverable
Alignment: There needs to be full alignment between the deliverables in SLAs and KPIs and customers’ needs with metrics leading the client to achieve their goals.

AIOps and how it complements the monitoring of SLAs and KPIs

AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) is aiding organizations that are using the following techniques to ensure much needed predictability within their service management landscapes:

The use big data, modern machine learning, and other advanced analytics technologies
Enhanced IT operations (monitoring, automation, and service desks)

Proactive, personal, and dynamic insights
Concurrent use of multiple data sources, data collection methods, analytical technologies, and presentation technologies.

AIOps from ADMnext: Taking your service management – and IT operations – to the next level

Capgemini’s approach to AIOps can enable you to substantially improve your service management by better predicting outages, catching performance degradation, and improving root-cause analysis, along with comprehensively orchestrating your automation efforts into a meaningful line-up of activities.

AIOps from ADMnext leverages Capgemini Intelligent Automation Platform (CIAP) to help you manage auto-ticketing with ITSM tools. This is done seamlessly through correlation solutions (Splunk, Elastic Search, etc.) and passed on to the automation platform to ensure auto execution of identified issues through alerts, logs, or events. Finally, the objective of SLA and KPI monitoring can’t be achieved fully until strategic, tactical, and operational events and reports are generated at regular intervals. Usually, a dashboard can provide a view of IT health from the lenses of SLAs and KPIs. If you do this right – the service management bull will of course not only be tamed – but domesticated it as well.

Operations Insights is a powerful solution which is integrated with our CIAP platform that helps you in reporting and aids in the management and tracking of your operations, performance, and data optimization. It also provides a 360o compliance view of assets and end-user services, which covers all SLA, KPI, and OLA performance and breaches and potential impacts – all from a single source. This is exactly how you grab the bull by the horns and tame the service management beast to continuously improve customer experience and application user satisfaction levels, while also controlling escalating IT costs.

To learn more about and AIOps from ADMnext, please contact Rakesh Goel here and B. Ramakrishnan here

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