Dear Bob ...You were quite critical of Service Level Agreements in your recent column, "Run, IT run ... but not as a business," (Keep the Joint Running, 1/28/2008), describing them as formal contracts between IT and the rest of the business.My opinion is that the concept of a Service Level Agreement is very sound. The implementation has run amok. An SLA should not be treated like a legal contract but an agreemen Dear Bob …You were quite critical of Service Level Agreements in your recent column, “Run, IT run … but not as a business,” (Keep the Joint Running, 1/28/2008), describing them as formal contracts between IT and the rest of the business.My opinion is that the concept of a Service Level Agreement is very sound. The implementation has run amok. An SLA should not be treated like a legal contract but an agreement between business units of the same company. Here is one definition I have seen that fits into what you are describing. Service Level Agreement: An Agreement between an IT Service Provider and a Customer. The SLA describes the IT Service, documents Service Level Targets, and specifies the responsibilities of the IT Service Provider and the Customer. A single SLA may cover multiple IT Services or multiple Customers.It is perhaps the result of IT’s importance to the business and the increasing percentage of the overall budget that has given rise to the SLA. Rarely do you see Accounting or Human Resources (both “service” organizations) submit any statement of service levels. In some cases Human Resources can encumber business growth more than IT. Faulty and ineffective recruiting and employee retention policies cost real money. Have you ever heard of an HR department agree to a 10% or less turnover rate? I have seen the level of complexity in SLA’s increase in recent years. The main problem is that the business and IT need to effectively communicate to each other to make service level agreements work. IT needs to understand how the business uses their services and the business needs to understand, at a high level, what it takes to deliver those services.The credibility of IT is still not strong with the business. In the eyes of the business leaders, IT projects and initiatives still do not deliver good value for the investment. C-level leaders are happy when a major project is completed and the business is still standing – e.g. SAP installations. Am I able to establish and maintain an agreement with someone whose competency I question? Contracts are very different from agreements. In a legal sense, a contract must completely define a business or personal arrangement. If it isn’t in the contract, it doesn’t exist. The quality of the relationship between the business an IT required for success cannot be totally defined in a contract. The requirements change daily. It is almost like a marriage, once the “contract” is signed, the real work begins. – Service levelerDear Leveler …I guess we’ll have to disagree on this one. I certainly agree that monitoring performance is essential. I agree that understanding what the business requires in terms of ongoing service is as important as understanding what it requires of new software. I’ve yet to see an SLA that wasn’t the product of negotiation. That’s what makes them contracts, and it’s the first place SLAs break down: They put IT and the rest of the business on opposite sides of the table, when they need to be collaborators who sit on the same side.You hit on another, also not covered in the column you referred to – that SLAs, are another step toward one of the great evils of the modern age – establishing a supplier/customer relationship between IT and the rest of the business.That’s how I’ve seen and heard of SLAs playing out in real companies that have put them into place, and it’s rarely a positive step. As regular readers of Keep the Joint Running know, I’m not a big fan of the whole “internal customer” philosophy (for a white paper that covers this subject, click here). If you’ve managed to implement SLAs as collaborative understandings with your peer collaborators throughout the business, more power to you. My unsolicited advice is to be very careful in keeping them at that level.At the first sign of trouble they can easily deteriorate into tools to support mutual finger pointing.On an entirely different subject, I do have to pick one nit in your letter. While HR is, in many organizations, guilty of a variety of sins, it rarely has much impact on employee retention. When turnover is high, the fault is almost always systemic, the result of pervasive bad management and poor leadership. The head of Human Resources can only wish he or she had enough influence over management behavior to have an impact on employee retention.– Bob Technology Industry