The end of SLAs: why experience is the new measure of IT success

Ten years from now, it will feel astonishing that there was around a fifty-year gap between the mainstreaming of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Experience Level Agreements (XLAs).

<![CDATA[ <article> <p>Ten years from now, it will feel astonishing that there was around a fifty-year gap between the mainstreaming of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Experience Level Agreements (XLAs). While SLAs have been common since the 1980s, it’s only in the last few years that XLAs have started to gain momentum. </p><p>The imminent adoption of ISO 20000-18 will propel XLAs even further. To comply with the new standard, organizations will be required to manage the digital experiences of both <a href="https://www.techradar.com/best/the-best-customer-database-software-of-year">customers</a> and users, integrating Experience Management (XM) into existing governance, management, and implementation processes.</p><p>Suddenly, demonstrating that your business delivers good digital experiences isn’t just an esoteric nice-to-have, but a critical part of winning new contracts. But although the idea of XLAs has been around for a while, few organizations have the institutional knowledge of how to practically implement these changes. </p><h2 id="why-bother-with-xlas">Why bother with XLAs?</h2><p>Before that, it’s worth asking why XLAs are necessary in the first place. Understanding what SLAs are missing is essential before starting to reformulate existing processes. </p><p>The simple answer is that what a system shows and what a user experiences are not the same thing. It doesn’t matter if a <a href="https://www.techradar.com/best/best-cloud-computing-services">cloud</a> application is ‘technically’ available if the experience is so glitchy that you abandon it after twenty seconds to never use it again. </p><p>That’s not to say that SLAs are now useless. Metrics like performance, ticket resolution times, and system availability still matter – they’re just no longer sufficient. You need to know whether your system is functioning, but you also need to know if an application is unresponsive for the user.</p><p>XLAs offer a different framing for the relationship between supplier and customer. Looking at metrics, like session stability during peak trading hours, tells you a lot more about how employees are able to perform than many SLA numbers. </p><h2 id="what-does-measuring-experience-mean">What does measuring ‘experience’ mean?</h2><p>It can be hard to know where to start as experience is a very broad term. Plus, it’s hard to measure something if you haven’t even defined it yet. As a result, there are hundreds of different metrics for experience measurement which fall, broadly speaking, into three main buckets:</p><p>Technical Data (T-Data): The technical performance of the product or service (for example, outages, freezes, crashes, etc.) provided by the Nexthink DEX platform. </p><p>Operational Data (O-Data): How well a given service performed and how well it was supported, which is usually captured through SLAs/KPIs.</p><p>Sentiment Data (X-Data): How the users themselves describe their feelings / perception (the truth according to them) toward a digital tool or service. </p><p>When considering how to reengineer existing processes to be ISO compliant, it’s essential to have <a href="https://www.techradar.com/best/best-data-migration-tools">data</a> sources from all three. Operational data is already generally well-covered by SLAs, and sentiment data is achieved via targeted survey campaigns that capture examples of technical issues. It’s the technical data that can be tricky for organizations attempting to use XLAs.</p><p>The technical data is essential because it brings together complete visibility across every endpoint and interaction, which means faster diagnostics. If an organization spots that users of a given <a href="https://www.techradar.com/best/browser">browser</a> are regularly having issues and can cross-reference that with the applications most disrupted, it can quickly identify root causes and implement remediations.</p><p>Moreover, this technical data is critical to pre-emptive and preventative IT by flagging which specific devices are non-compliant with the latest updates. </p><h2 id="embracing-dexops">Embracing DEXOps </h2><p>However, one of the key mistakes that <a href="https://www.techradar.com/best/best-business-cloud-storage-service">businesses</a> make when bringing in Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platforms for the first time is starting by asking ‘what can this platform do?’ This is the wrong question to ask.</p><p>As the new ISO itself attests, IT’s job is no longer simply pushing technology, but delivering the services and infrastructure that <a href="https://www.techradar.com/pro/best-employee-management-software-of-year">employees</a> need in ways that improve outcomes across the business through an experience-centric approach.</p><p>This is the core principle at the heart of DEXOps, a philosophy that takes experience as the central pillar of an employee’s day (and therefore their productivity and engagement).</p><p>DEXOps operationalizes experience by starting with the immediate concerns and frustrations of individual business units, understanding what the consequences of these issues are, and finding technological solutions that eliminate the root causes of digital friction.</p><p>Rather than focusing on technical capabilities, IT leaders should start by asking other business units: </p><p>What are your team’s top priorities?</p><p>Where are you experiencing friction or risk?</p><p>What does success look like for you and how is that measured?</p><p>Do you know what value you bring to the overall business? </p><p>It’s amazing how much more engaged other parts of the business will be when, instead of diving into ISO compliance requirements, the conversations revolve around how their most pressing challenges can be fixed. </p><h2 id="xlas-are-an-opportunity-as-well-as-a-challenge">XLAs are an opportunity as well as a challenge </h2><p>Many businesses immediately tend to view new regulation as a burden. But ISO 20000-18 and the increasing role of XLAs also represent an opportunity to accelerate the changes already happening to the role of the IT department. The shift from <a href="https://www.techradar.com/best/best-infrastructure-management-service">infrastructure</a> to experience is tricky and requires businesses to be open to significant realignment across traditional roles, responsibilities, and metrics.</p><p>Some organizations will continue to ignore the importance of experience, but the broader changes that have driven the drafting and implementation of the regulations are here to stay. Businesses that see the new standard as an opportunity to use regulation to create a competitive advantage will have a crucial head start on those that are still stuck in the old, outdated, reflexive IT model.</p><p><em></em><a href="https://www.techradar.com/best/best-bi-tools"><em>We've featured the best business intelligence platform.</em></a></p><p><em>This article was produced as part of </em><a href="https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives" target="_blank"><em>TechRadar Pro Perspectives</em></a><em>, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.</em></p><p><em>The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: </em><a href="https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro" target="_blank"><em>https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit</em></a></p> </article> ]]>