There's No Such Thing as an IT Project by Dave Kaiser & Bob Lewis

Author:Dave Kaiser & Bob Lewis [Dave Kaiser]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2019-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

The Case against Technical SLAs

Here’s why technical SLAs are (or should be) a thing of the past: once upon a time, high-availability architectures were a choice. Now they aren’t.

The fact of the matter is that even when some poor business manager agreed to a technical SLA—98 percent uptime used to be common—he agreed only because he had no real choice. A critical system going down was never acceptable, no matter what the SLA said. Back in the day, the only acceptable service level was the one the telecom department delivered: every time someone picked up the phone they got a dial tone; every time they dialed a number the call went through.*

The Digital world has changed all that. Blame Amazon if you like. When your employees shop there, they never experience an outage, and “employees” includes your executives and managers. One hundred percent uptime all the time, and with snappy performance to go with it, is now what everyone understands is possible, and possible at a scale far beyond anything your company has to achieve.

Oh, and they (and you) also expect that Amazon will process orders, ship merchandise, and even handle returns flawlessly. Service accuracy is baked into Amazon. It’s been part of its competitive advantage for years.*

It’s now the norm and everyone’s expectation.

Should IT Operations continue to track service levels for the technical services it provides? Yes, if it isn’t doing very well, but only as a tool to get it to where continued tracking would be a waste of time.

Because while a given piece of equipment might fail, that’s no longer a reason for systems to be out of commission. That’s the nature of high-availability architectures. If a system is ever unavailable, that should be a sufficiently rare event that keeping statistical track is a waste of time.

What won’t be a waste of time is a root cause analysis, because every outage means your high-availability architecture has a design flaw that needs fixing.

What also isn’t a waste of time is continuing to analyze reported incidents to detect and address emerging problems early, before they become detectable to the business at large.

Occasional outages used to be a normal part of doing business. In 2018, as we write these words, outages are no longer normal.

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