Service Agreements: A Management Guide (ITSM Library)

Many organizations are demanding increased quality levels from ICT service providers, often irrespective of whether these services are outsourced or supplied in-house. Service management (SM) is the integrated approach to the management of ICT service requirements and levels. This new publication outlines the background, operation, and benefits of a variety of service agreements, and includes models for the design of a service catalogue and service agreement development. This book is founded on research conducted at Rhodes University into Service Management and Service Agreements. The initial prompting for this research came from one of the industry partners of the Distributed Multimedia Centre of Excellence. They expressed difficulty in the development and management of Service Level Agreements. It is important to realise that this is not an ITIL book. The ITIL framework is just one of many approaches that were used to develop the framework and model in this book that were then tested empirically in the research. Not every reader will be from an ITIL background and although it is one of the better (and more comprehensive) frameworks at the moment, this book is designed specifically to be useful to all SM practitioners. This book lays out the fundamentals of an SM strategy and describes in more detail, the contents of, and how to develop, the major parts of this strategy. Follow these guidelines and your SM initiative is far more likely to be successful. Note: This book is available in several languages: Chinese, English. This book provides a more thorough approach to service agreements than available so far. It takes the material from ITIL best practices one step further, by providing a more comprehensive and holistic approach to service agreements. This is itSMF Management Guide lays out the fundamentals of a Service Management strategy, focusing on the concept of Service Agreements.--Back cover