Technology requirements

Technology has improved the support of ITSM best practices consistently over the last 20 to 30 years. It has especially matured the support of many processes including SLM. The following list shows many of the key requirements for the SLM process. You may have additional requirements, but the list is a sample of what should be expected of any service management tool. The most important things to remember about selecting any technology is that it will not make a poor process better and that you need to select the one that will be most effective for your needs.

SLM requirements include the following:

• The capability to store SLAs, OLAs, and underpinning contracts
• Being able to associate SLAs to business groups so that impact can be determined if a service is performing to below-agreed-upon levels
• Being able to maintain historical data and information on services such as SLA/OLA results produced for each service
• Being able to organize services...