Organisations frequently turn to external advisors to support decision making and implementation of new sourcing arrangements – whether it is outsourcing, shared services etc. Sourcing Advisors have traditionally focussed their support on the strategic decision making process and the implementation. My sense is that ongoing measurement of the value and effectiveness of sourcing deals has largely been a ‘no go’ area for advisors. They typically agree to leave the building at project end and the client Service Management team or Shared Services Team remain to manage the service on a day to day basis. The contacts I have had over the last number of week from advisors suggests that this ‘clean break’ approach is changing.
Advisors have always recognised that ongoing management of services can be challenging. They always embed strong process and best practices during the set up phase to try to ensure that ongoing service management is as effective and clear as possible. But tracking and monitoring Service Level Agreements has always been difficult. In many organisations Service Level Agreements are still tracked using spreadsheets. There are obvious limitations with spreadsheets in terms of the level of manual effort involved and the potential for errors – but the real danger is that there is no meaningful Business Intelligence available on the SLAs from the client side. The process of analysing service levels and generating insights becomes impossible because data is never agrgregated over periods of time and trends are not visible. When we built our SLA Management tool we did not realise that the Advisory Community would become very enthusiastic advocates. Their approach has been to see ServiceFrame for what it really is - an extremely valuable tool to pull together all the performance data on your SLAs and present it to you in way that is meaningful across multiple services and over periods of time. But importantly a tool that can be deployed in hours and without significant cost.
Advisors recognise that when organisations use an SLA Management tool like ServiceFrame they are suddenly empowered to look at their own performance data and make decisions about where they need to change or improve service levels. They also have information readily available which they can use to ensure that service management meetings are informed by accurate data which is agreed by all parties. ServiceFrame alerts organisations when there is a disjoint between compliant service delivery and customer satisfaction – or when there are consistent issues with service delivery. Advisors recognise that where they introduce tools like ServiceFrame into their clients SLAs will not be ignored – but rather that ServiceFrame will ensure that clients always have good information on the quality of service being delivered – this means that when advice and support is needed from advisors they can provide it against a background of actually knowing exactly what is going on from a service perspective. In some cases they can also provide ongoing insights to their clients because the clients can readily and easily send them information on current performance levels. This access to accurate information provides advisory firms with a rare opportunity to maintain an ongoing low touch but high impact relationship with their clients.
Business Intelligence on SLAs
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