The impact of quality governance on information technology service delivery

Abstract

Computacenter SA (CCSA), serves as focus of this study. One ofCCSA's clients is Unipart and therefore will be used as the example to mitigate the research problem, serving to demonstrate how Service Levels are structured and how they are monitored. According to the Company policy and agreed Service Level Agreements (SLA's), an acceptance level of 95% should be reached in terms of service delivery. Anything below 95% would be considered a failure, and therefore constitutes a breach of the agreement. The tool used by Computacenter South Africa (CCSA), to measure or monitor the SLA is referred to as Service Flow. Within Service Flow there are mechanisms known as 'pre exception result' and a 'post exception result'. These concepts constitute a report, which is compiled on a monthly basis to check and evaluate performance. Should a request from a client not be met and there is a valid reason for the non compliance of the request. It can however bean exception and can therefore be processed as being successfully executed within the context of the SLA. If no valid reasons are, however logged in the request work log, the request constitutes as failed and can therefore lead to the team not achieving their agreed SLA with the customer. Failing SLA's have a significant impact on, not only CCSA, but also on the customer, as the organisation can lose confidence in the ability of Longbow Remote Technical Support Request Management is there to render a quality service. Ultimately, a penalty can be imposed on both the analysts and CCSA. In addition, the customer could withdraw from the contract as the organisation is not receiving the agreed upon services for which they are paying. CCSA will not only suffer financially, but also lose its credibility in the market as an Information Technology (IT) Service Provider. For the purpose of this study, questionnaires were formulated to determine where the problem areas are and what CCSA as a service provider can do to not cause their clients to become redundant, and to always meet the service level agreements set by the clients. Results from the research returned that a lack of Information Technology governance structures and best practices within CCSA is the cause of service level agreements failing.