Operational Level Agreements

Service guarantees exist between IT and other departments in the organization to track hardware or software asset availability and response performance. For example, the IT department might guarantee that a department server will be available 98% of the time and that 99% of the time IT will respond to an outage involving that device within one hour, or that a change will be complete by a specified time.

An Operational Level Agreement (OLA) is a service agreement that describes these guarantees, tracks compliance, and calculates the potential economic impact of outages within the organization. Most organizations use OLAs to:

• Focus on discrete performance metrics, such as hardware availability.
• Add metrics for service desk performance, technician response time, and customer satisfaction.
• Assess the economic impact of outages on the enterprise.
• Publish satisfaction statistics to the internal user community.

The OLA produces metrics through links to the contact records of all responsible personnel, including problem owners. An administrator must ensure that the contact records of all affected personnel have valid ITSMA Service Management  IDs.

The out-of-box examples show how to define OLAs for internal services, such as Change Management or Problem Management.