By Alex Vilensky, Senior Consultant
Frequently on client engagements I noticed that even sophisticated BI and data warehouse development teams omit Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Comments like “... Why should I bother amending my company’s service levels into the contract when the vendor should be handling that task...?” or, “Shouldn’t the vendor be telling US what the SLAs are?” underscore the point that development teams don’t consider SLAs a core responsibility.
Meanwhile your vendor is protecting its own interests. A down-the-road realization of a weak agreement with the vendor will likely occur once it’s too late for a “win-win.” The risk is cost overruns, low staff morale, and eroded vendor goodwill. Here is a list of some actual SLAs for BI vendors according to three different categories: system performance, organization/people support, and application quality categories.
System Performance
- BI application design screen refresh SLA’s (of 1 second, 6 seconds and 15 seconds) must be consistent with client’s refresh SLA’s of 2 to 7 seconds. Vendor is expected to meet refresh SLA’s with additional hardware and/or application tuning.
- Data Warehouse daily batch runs are not must occur within the established 2-hour window.
Organization/People Support
- Vendor ‘s support staff must have at least two client references per staff member.
- Vendor must be able to articulate changes from prior to current release in writing prior to installing the subsequent release.
Application Quality
- Code quality must be demonstrated (test cases) to be better than in the previous release prior to the release.
- Patch quality issues – ensure all patches are well tested without cause of problems elsewhere in the code. For every iterative patch needed to solve a single issue, vendor must reimburse support credit dollars.
SLAs help to manage expectations and drive consensus. They form a partnership bond with clear definition of the level of product and service support and escalation procedures when something goes awry. In a mature production environment, clear service levels drive the long-term client/vendor relationship with concise expectations and clarity about the role and responsibility of each party.
Alex Vilensky has over 20 years experience in significant areas of information systems design and development including business requirements definition, logical and physical design, application development, technical leadership, project management, disaster recovery, systems programming, and database administration.
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