Service level agreements in Municipal IT dependability management

Service Level Agreements (SLA) are considered a good practice not only for IT outsourcing but also for IT management within an organisation. In this paper we study the usage of SLAs in municipal IT management. Municipal IT management traditionally involves a large organisation, often with a low IT maturity, but with high requirements on software quality and information security. In this study, a series of interviews was conducted with IT managers from a number of Swedish municipalities which shows a need for more support for municipalities trying to write and improve their SLAs. Based on a number of SLAs collected, this study proposes a specific SLA template for municipal IT management that focuses especially on information security issues. In a final step, the proposed template was evaluated in a focus group meeting with practitioners from Swedish municipalities.