Fewer IT departments meet defined Service Level Agreements per Janco Survey

IT service levels fall as ITSM implementations falter

ITSM – SOA template 2021 Edition released to help organizations revisit SLA definitions

Park City – UTe-janco.com – Janco IT Service Management study finds that many IT operations are not meeting service levels needed by users. To counter this Janco has just released its ITSM Template to help CIOs to revisit Service Level Agreements (SLA) as the back to the office takes hold.

The CEO of Janco Associates, Inc., Mr. M. Victor Janulaitis said, “Comparing results of our 2021 ITSM and related SLAs survey with the 2019 survey, we found that IT Service Management and Service Oriented Architecture has been adversely impacted. In the past several months, users contacting service center and help desks only to find excessively long wait times to talk to an agent. A task as simple as making a change to a reservation often results in a response that ‘due to increased demand wait times are longer than normal’ and they ask the user to go to a website. Many sites are difficult to navigate and the virtual agent is not able to address the user’s needs.”

The CEO added, “Our survey was on the company side and all but two (2) of eleven (11) KPI metrics went down. The percentages were not major, but when we talked users, we noted a marked increase in dissatisfaction with service and support. We concluded that the Service Level Agreement process needs to be revisited with ITSM and SOA as a priority.”

The study found:

  1. Business Unit users were not as happy with IT performance in the past year
  2. Companies were not as responsive and supportive as in 2019
  3. Fewer support function reported ITSM metrics related to SLAs to business units
  4. Access to help desk and service functions was more difficult
  5. Quality and speed of responses did not meet expectations
  6. There was less proactive problem solving. More of the help desk and service functions was structured around per-defined "scripts".
  7. Less ITSM training was conducted
  8. ROI was not calculated for many of changes requested.

On the bright side, more Business Units were aware of tools available, and more organizations had recently defined SLAs by their business units.

ITSM KPI Metrics

Mr. Janulaitis said, “We have update our ITSM – SOA template to reflect the findings of the study, added materials to address WFH, and include eight (8) detail job descriptions to support the creation of SLAs with KPI Metrics that are meaningful in the post pandemic environment.” 

The full description of the latest edition of the ITSM – SOA template  can be found at https://e-janco.com/itsm.htm.

Janco is an international consulting firm that follows issues that concern CIOs and CFOs. The firm publishes a series of IT and business Infrastructure HandiGuides® and Templates including IT Infrastructure Policies and Procedures, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Template, Security Template, IT Job Descriptions, and its semi-annual IT Salary Survey.