Poor application performance dents SLAs

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Poor application performance not only leads to increase IT costs and lost business revenue, but is the primary reason for not meeting service level agreements (SLAs), according to a new survey.

The global research - carried out by IT analyst Forrester Research among 389 IT decision makers - found that while 81 per cent of organisations had adopted formal SLAs with their businesses, they only met these agreements on average 74 per cent of the time.

When asked about the cost of poor application performance, 57 per cent of respondents cited increased costs to the business as a result and nearly half (48 per cent) reported lost revenue. Other affects on the business of performance issues on SLAs include a negative impact on external customer satisfaction levels (48 per cent), productivity interruptions (42 per cent) and a negative impact on sales performance.

In the study, Forrester concluded that the primary reason for missing SLAs is that the business unit has expectations out of the reach of IT. It blamed this management breakdown on IT setting metrics that are IT-centric and incompatible with business objectives.

It also found that 41 per cent of respondents agreed that their insight into service levels is basic and that they don’t provide SLA information to executives on a regular basis. And two out of every five IT decision makers agreed that their service level reporting lacks information that their executives have requested.

Jean-Pierre Garbani, Forrester Research vice president and principal analyst, said: “The ultimate judge of IT and business alignment is the end user: If alignment is viewed as conformity to user expectations in terms of availability, performance, usability, and accuracy, then monitoring end user performance is the only way IT knows that it is meeting these expectations.”

The Compuware sponsored report recommended IT organisations orient their SLA frameworks more towards end-user experience (EUE) monitoring, which is designed to provide visibility into the quality of service from the end user’s perspective and establish more realistic IT delivery expectations with the business.

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