SLAs & Contracts Management
Walking the Contract Talk
The advent of business process outsourcing (BPO), and the convergence of outsourcing with on demand IT services, has fueled the move towards performance management using automated systems and network dashboards, service level agreements (SLAs), and key performance indicators (KPIs). Service providers now seek to distinguish themselves from their competition by basing their fees on achieving quality and revenue targets. At the very least customers now expect some kind of up front service levels and credits.
Bridging the Divide Between Techno-Speak and the Language of Business
The full value of IT supported services outsourcing lies not just in the systems and the professional services but in the totality of the solution they present. Applying meaningful SLAs is a matter of measuring both IT metrics and business performance. Home grown provider SLAs may offer great visibility into back end operations, but technical information by itself is probably not helpful to management on the customer end tasked with evaluating the service.
James River takes an integrated approach to performance measurement of IT supported business services. Linked SLA Hierarchy (Link-Hier) first looks at the anticipated customer value of the service and develops SLAs that measure business impact. Working backwards, we look in depth at service technical operations and focus on their monitoring and reporting for the purpose of supporting business SLAs. During service performance, business performance is compared with technical metrics to identify causes of poor performance as well as evaluate how well IT is supporting the delivery of value.
James River's Linked Hierarchy Process
Doing Business in Today's Virtual Business World
Our Service 2.0 methodology unifies contract terms among the customer and service provider companies in situations where the delivery of business services requires more than one provider, such as remote hosting of computer systems or outsourcing of multiple business processes. Most multi-provider service arrangements are contractually uncoordinated, meaning that the SLAs and performance commitments made to the customer cannot legally or physically be fulfilled. Through implementation of different contracting architectures like hub-and-spoke, flow-down, and multi-partite, James River makes service levels credible, instead of nothing more than well intended words, by establishing the required contract clauses with the providers actually responsible for the service and making the clauses enforceable on behalf of the customer, regardless of which provider is the sales channel. Service 2.0 also recognizes that getting credits or discounts for bad service isn't what customer companies want or need.
James River's Service 2.0 Methodology
Responding with Agile Contracts Management
Rapidly changing business conditions during the life of all services contracts are met by James River with Agile Contracts Management—skilled, real time use of change orders, dispute resolution, termination and close out, and preparation of breach claims.
Establishing Contracts, Control and Compliance Command
Governance-Compliance-Risk Management (GRC) is on the minds of all companies regardless of size or whether they are public or private. Aren't sales and supply contracts a primary means by which any business controls financial reporting data? Not to mention implement corporate governance initiatives and comply with laws? What about incorporating environmentally sound business methods like the Dow Jones Sustainability Index? GRC Through Contracting (GRCX) is our way of making contracts into forceful GRC tools.