Check out Duke's Office of Information Technology page on SLAs and OLAs. They have sample SLA and OLA templates!

In Computerworld Magazine, Paul Ingevaldson recently wrote an article called "Top 10 qualities of a great IT shop." These qualities include the CIO reporting to the CEO, an executive steering committee, and a focus on the software development lifecycle.

A couple of the qualities relate to ITIL, such as having a security team (loosely Security Management), a disaster recovery process (IT Service Continuity Management), SDLC focus (very loosely Service Design), and participating in the long-range planning (Service Strategy).

The list looks OK to me, so I'm wondering: why don't ITIL concepts show up more often in Paul's list? Here are my guesses:

Yesterday I attended the Central Carolina itSMF LIG meeting. The NC Government's Office of Information Technology Services (ITS) presented on "Service Level Agreements and a Service Catalog."

Service Level Management

Service Level Management ties what IT is providing to what the University needs. Service Level Management prevents IT from offering "esoteric" services, and assists the University in understanding what is practical.

Contacts and Resources

Please see the Service Level Agreement template, attached to this page. "FV2" is the most recent version, and assumes your organization also has a "Global Service Level Agreement" that covers generic service levels for all services.

Kevin Ritter from State Farm presented on "Battle of the Wills--SLM and Interdependencies with other ITIL(tm) Disciplines."

From his presentation it sounds like State Farm has a lot of ITSM employees and that the organization is very familiar with ITSM. Kevin is in the service level management group.

At 10 AM, Robert Benyon from Rhodes University in South Africa presented on "A Framework for the Implementation of Service Management." He only got 50 minutes to speak (like all the track sessions) but he was really good! Robert studied ITSM for his Master's degree at Rhodes University, plus he works in their IS department.