Improving Service Level Management Practices: A Case Study in an IT Service Provider Organization

Abstract

The main objective of the Service Level Management process is to ensure that an agreed level of IT service is provided for all current IT services and that future services are delivered to agreed achievable targets. The number of agreed SLAs has rapidly increased in the IT industry while more and more IT customers have become aware of Service Level Management best practices. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most widely used IT service management framework that provides best practices for implementing IT service management processes including Service Level Management. The research problem of this study is: how Service Level Agreements can be implemented with an IT service management tool. We use a combination of IT service management and knowledge management approach to study the problem. The main contribution of this paper is to present results of a case study that focused on improving Service Level Management practices in a Finnish IT service provider company Tieto.