Service Level Management overview

Service management best practices describe the goals for Service Level Management (SLM) as follows:

The goal for SLM is to maintain and improve IT Service quality, through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting upon IT Service achievements and instigation of actions to eradicate poor service – in line with business or cost justification. Through these methods, a better relationship between IT and its Customers can be developed.

ITSMA Service Management supports these goals by providing a service management best practices compliant application framework with a built-in workflow that incorporates service management best practices. The primary Service Level Management goal is to ensure the delivery of services within agreed Service Level Targets (SLTs), including the following:

• Availability of the Configuration Item, which includes planned and unplanned outages
• Response time, which tracks the amount of time it takes for the incident, service desk interaction, or change request to advance to the next state (For example, the amount of time required for an incident record status to change from Open to Work in Progress.)

Configuring Service Level Targets and the various types of service agreements are the tools that Service Level Management uses to accomplish these goals.