Towards Service Level Engineering for IT Services: Defining IT Services from a Line of Business Perspective

Today, the management of service quality is posing a major challenge for many service systems formed by providers and their business customers. We argue that the trade-off between service costs and benefits incurred by both of these parties is not sufficiently considered when service quality is stipulated. Many Service Level Agreements are tailored to fine-grained IT services. The impact of service levels defined for these technical services on customers\´ business processes, however, is difficult to estimate. Thus, it is a major objective to identify IT services that directly affect the performance of customers\´ business departments. In this research-in-progress paper we present first results of an empirical study aiming at the definition of IT services and corresponding service level indicators from a customer business department perspective. Based on an initial literature research and a number of semi-structured interviews - with users working in different departments of a public IT customer and having different backgrounds and IT knowledge - we have identified a set of common, "directly business-relevant" IT services. Thus, we take an important first step towards the application of Service Level Engineering, i.e. the derivation of business-relevant performance metrics and associated cost-efficient target values to precisely identify efficient service quality.