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Integrating Service Level Agreements: Optimizing Your OSS for SLA Delivery

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This book is among the most coherent and on target approaches to integrated service level management I've read. The most appropriate audience includes IT and switch engineering professionals in the wireless, LEC and CLEC industries, although those working for ISPs, manager service providers and ASPs will find the material closely aligned to their environments as well.

For the primary audience this book shows how to look beyond managing service levels and QoS at the infrastructure level. It looks at the much larger business picture with a focus on external customers. It does cover infrastructure, using TMN as the model, but the thrust is coordination of all customer-facing or service providing groups to provide a unified service delivery strategy.

I like the way the book starts by defining SLAs and showing how they are the foundation of service delivery. The models provided in Part I of the book were especially valuable. Part II ties together the preceding material to present an integrated model, which addresses both workflow and organizational factors. More importantly, this part of the book covers performance metrics (service level objectives), reporting and notification.

The approach and material in this book can be readily adapted to traditional IT service level management, and in particular the way the authors lead you through writing the SLAs and managing to them. What is missing in the book is a bigger view of how SLAs fit within a problem management framework, but this isn't an oversight given the scope of the book. For anyone who is interested in filling in this critical piece I recommend reading IT Problem Management by Gary S. Walker. Although that book is focused on IT, the approach will fit within the OSS environment, and the service level related information in that book is consistent with this one.