SLA's Are CYA's

SLA’s are CYA’s. Confused? Service Level Agreements (SLA) are for Covering Your Ass (CYA). At least, that is what speaker Doug Neal has to say about it. He argued that we need to look risk in the eye; to model and deliver performance. Coming from a world of SLA and having gone through the exercise recently with both internal and external customers I was intrigued by the concept. I was also intrigued by the relationship to BPM.

Doug went on to show an example of how he thought a BPMS is going to be key to helping companies become green. How? By making invisible process transactions visible. Visibility is the beginning. I slowly began to realize that a BPMS gives a record of any transaction; you can prove performance across the board. As managers, we now have the view into our business that gives us both the information and means to manage before things get out of hand. In effect, giving us the ability to adapt in real-time our management and rules. Sounds good. Maybe too good.

When I was at General Electric we talked a lot about the digital cockpit. The digital cockpit was just a fancy name for a metrics dashboard. We used the analogy of an aircraft cockpit… all the instruments (a.k.a. metrics) you need to know how things are going. Doug made a comment over drinks, “What does a cockpit have in it?” The answer is both the instruments and the flight controls. “We have given managers the instruments, but no knobs to control it. A BPMS begins to give us the knobs.” This really resonated with me. How do we build both the real-time instruments and controls to deliver performance?