Telephone Services SLA

8 – Pricing and Billing – this being a Enterprise Service, could this be stated in the SLA ?

2.1.2 – Request to add-  “Staff initiating long distance code requests can also see the LCD issued to the end user” – in some cases, the LCD issued is incorrect or users lose the email, this will save repeated Help.UNM requests if initiating staff can maintain their users’ LCDs and test them.

• What is time to completion for LCD creation?
• What is time to completion for phone line move/addition?
• What is time to completion for break/fix of active phone line?

3.1 What are department’s options in terms of cost recovery for loss of services?

6 –  Incident

• Does the department have the ability to declare an incident?  Within this SLA, does an interruption in the normal functioning of a service or system include the department’s services or systems?
• If the department experiences incidents, what are the department’s options in terms of escalation and revision of the SLA?

6.3 can a department communicate to UNM IT phone systems it considers critical?  For example, the receptionist phone line for most departments is critical to the public being able to call that department – if its service is lost, can it be treated as a P1?
9.1 Performance and Reporting

• If Targeted uptime is 99.9, shouldn’t there be a reporting interface for customers to see?

9.2 who are the primary stakeholders? In terms of the review facilitation, that’s a bit unclear.  Would it be useful to do annual reviews of the SLA with the customers?

Provide a statement about phone monitoring by the University.  What information is collected (or not)?  Outgoing phone #s, incoming phone #s, call duration?   Are the calls themselves ever monitored?

I have concerns about the SLA process. The ones I’ve read so far are too general with a significant amount of boilerplate language simply carried from one SLA to the other. Although I understand that the timeline was set by President Frank for SLA generation, it’s not clear to me that the President set the timeline for the comment period. It seems highly unlikely that busy IT employees have the time to read, consider, and respond to these critically important documents. Several of the SLAs will need tweaked to satisfy specific departmental needs and that language needs built into every SLA produced during this process. However, my biggest concern is the lack of consequences if the terms of the SLA are not met. I attended an IT UNM meeting last fall where the CIO spoke about SLAs back when SLA generation was to be a collaborative effort with involvement from IT Agents and others from the UNM IT community. When asked about consequences if the SLA terms were not met, the CIO’s response was that people would lose their jobs. Perhaps the CIO didn’t anticipate that meeting attendees would have questions about consequences  but such a superficial reply to a serious question is troubling to me. The bottom line is that there needs to be specific, well-defined consequences for not meeting the SLA terms for both the customer and Central IT.
2.1.3 – Bullet 2 – “All services and devices…”. Audio conferencing devices (ie, “Polycom”) units should be explicitly excluded from being purchased through UNM IT if they are supported by departmental IT.
3.1 Bullet 8 and 3.2 Bullet 2 – Both pertain to the Pinnacle billing system. Pinnacle desperately needs an update. For example, the Reports/Usage by Org shows all reports that have ever been generated. For one of our orgs, those date back to 2004. Since we are required by policy to look at the reports monthly, that’s 144 reports that I must scroll through in order to run a report for the current month. Additionally, the departmental reports listed within the My Reports tab are useless. The Auth Codes by Index does NOT return the current/active codes. I was told by someone within Telecomm that there isn’t a way to determine what codes are deployed and that I should look at the monthly reports to see if they are used. That obviously is not a good answer for codes that are not regularly used or were assigned to employees who have left either the department or UNM. Although Networking isn’t covered by this SLA, they also use Pinnacle for their billing. There is no relationship between a service desk ticket number, the actual work order number, and the Pinnacle report. When a charge appears, the only way to determine what it’s for is to have someone in Central IT decipher what job was billed. Please consider updating the billing system.

3.2 Bullet 9 – The policy for provisioning long distance codes needs changed so that departmental IT can take on the role and responsibility for tracking actual long distance codes, not just the Auth Code. It seems silly that we are entrusted to manage PII and other sensitive data yet we can’t be trusted to manage long distance codes. If a user forgets their code, a ticket must be submitted to the service desk yet the user must have needed to place a long distance call right then, or they would not have been trying to use their code. It seems obvious to me that they will simply “borrow” someone else’s code in spite of that being a policy violation. If departmental IT is provided with the LDC and Auth Code, the user can simply call the local help desk and can use their personal code for the call(s).
Cyndi Johnson
School of Law

Can this document start with a definition of telephone services? Does it include mobile? internet telephony? Where is the line between a Skype call and a Skype video call? Are usage of internet VOIP systems, voicemail, call forwarders, etc. allowed or excluded under this SLA?

2.1.3 – are services and devices purchased from areas other than UNM IT prohibited, or just not supported? The distinction is important. This gets to the question about whether the SLA is describing an exclusive service or a service being offered by one department with choice if the service doesn’t meet the department need.

2.2.2 – 99.9% up time seems very low for a phone service. Is an outage of 1.5 minutes/day or almost 9 hours/year acceptable? Is planned maintenance included in that calculation?

2.2 – Can the SLA define service levels associated with maintenance and installation in addition to up-time? What for example are the roles and response times related to moving /installing phone lines, etc.? What is the response for incidents affecting a single phone or building vs. the system as a whole?

3.2 – What is GNAV? who needs to pay for licensing and training?

“<span style=”line-height: 1.5;”>Provide thirty day notice for special events and moves that involve more than six phones;” – this is not always possible. Is there an emergency request process?</span>

5.2 – Now I see that you have defined some service levels for service requests. Is there any escalation process for phone moves when they cannot wait 10-13 days?

6.1 – How is culpability determined for incidents? how are disputes managed?

7 – What is the process for notification and negotiation related to changes in the maintenance window?

SP/MSR – Paragraph 2 refers customers to the Service Description. Paragraph 2.1 includes a synopsis of that description

SP/MSR (Bulled 2.1.3) – This is a process question, not part of the SLA. Exceptions to centrally purchased devices are authorized on a per requirement basis. We will only support product, services we provide

SP/MSR (Bullet 2.2.2) 99.9% is a conservative approach, agreed, and our systems are closer to five 9’s. However, there are no automated tools in place to track the uptime due to costs and integration requirements, so it is a manual process we use to calculate availability. Additionally, some of our services are IP based, on the network. Decentralized Department Denial of Service attacks (via compromised hosts) can and most likely affect our service. We have factored that into our target

SP/MSR (Bullet 2.2) This is a process question, not an SLA question. However, it is reiterated in the SLA in paragraph 5.2, service request response for your convenience. The SLA defines the 10-13 day window for a MAC (move, add or change) defining the roles is internal to IT customer service, IT voice, IT facilities, IT data and external vendors we utilize. The SLA defines the response times for trouble tickets (incidents) based on ITIL practices defining this urgency and response times.

SP/MSR (Bullet 3.2) Process/Service Description question. Not an SLA question. Please refer to the Service Description as required

SP/MSR – 30 day notice question – IT voice has an expedite charge for any request. The process is to ask that your project be escalated and it will be moved up in the 10-13 day window and an expedite charge applies accordingly for that migration

SP/MSR (Bullet 5.2) Process/Service Description question. Not an SLA question. Please refer to the Service Description as required

SP/MSR (Bullet 6.1) In referring to incidents (trouble tickets) that is stated in the SLA for the turn around, triage based on the ITIL matrix for the severity of the incident

SP/MSR (Bullet 7) Process question, not an SLA question