Executive's Guide to IT Governance: Improving Systems Processes with Service Management, COBIT, and ITIL

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Service Level Agreements, itSMF, Val IT, and Maximizing IT Investments

MANY YEARS AGO, THE VERY FIRST MAINFRAME COMPUTER SYSTEMS were installed in major corporations with objectives of streaming operations and cost savings and sometimes also for a bit of corporate prestige. These were the early days when those very expensive mainframe systems were often located in glass-walled enclosures in corporate lobbies with high expectations of the savings the business would gain from this then-new technology. Disappointment soon followed, however. Because of safety and space concerns, those mainframe computers, with their growing array of tape drives and mass storage units, were soon moved to remote corporate locations. Even more important, the investment savings were usually not very rapid due to the cost of recruiting and building an IT specialist staff, the time delays and costs associated with many IT development projects, and application software that did not work as well as expected. Enterprises soon realized there was a need to review and attempt to gain an increased benefit from their IT investments at all levels.

This chapter reviews IT governance issues and concerns from multiple perspectives regarding an enterprise’s investment in IT resources. We will first discuss the importance of effectively installing and managing IT service level agreements (SLAs) as part of an enterprise’s IT operations. SLAs and related service management guidance are one of the ITIL ...