Department Specific SLA

I had already started a thread on setting up an exception process here; no one from IT has responded in it, however. I’m happy to provide feedback as appropriate to try to help the services being proposed better meet our needs so that we could potentially move people to IT-provided services; that said, most of my comments in those places have gone unanswered for a week or more. Moreover, some of the services demands of some of the departments in some areas (e.g. network management, IP address assignment, email, etc.) are *far* beyond what is being proposed so I’m not sure how productive some of my feedback would be. 

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by patrickb.

Finally, please remember that there are important academic freedom issues that arise with proposals to limit what faculty, departments, and units are allowed to do beyond our legal obligations. I haven’t seen any consideration of that mentioned in this process at all, and several faculty in my department have expressed their concerns about this to me.

“There is a good chance that input from one area might also be relevant to others on campus and we would like to consider the suggestion in that context and also get feedback from others.”

A better process for doing this would be to categorize departments by similar needs. Why try to lump everyone into the same “enterprise service”? I am sure the needs of the bookstore are different than the needs for the hospital and for an academic department. 

Another important point in justifying the need of department specific SLA’s is the use of language such as “Administrator will utilize departmental (local) IT contact for first level triage of incidents and service requests, when available.” This language along with the statement made at IT agents that certain enterprise services could not be offered to the degree that they are without departmental support suggest to me that departmental IT organizations need to be very clear in their own SLA’s how we provide those “1st level support” services to our areas and what limitations we may have considering we are not all operating with the same tools or processes.
Due to statements that also hold both departmental IT and their departments liable for costs such as “UNM IT will bring to the Department’s attention any situation in which extra time is being required of UNM IT staff to support services due to lack of Department staff knowledge, planning or poor UNM implementation practices. In these situations, UNM IT reserves the right to bill, at our standard hourly rate or expedited service rate, for additional time spent in support of services being delivered to the Department” we need a clear method of identify our services and processes that would limit liability and risk. Blanket statements like these run the risk of setting up areas to fail due to lack of access to the same tools that UNM IT or other groups may have.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by wvaldez.

I haven’t posted on this thread not because I’m uninterested in this topic but, rather, because of time limitations. I agree with what has been said so far, and believe that dbanward (Darrell Banward, University Press) is right on with his comment that we are trying to fit all of UNM into the same bucket, yet our needs and our customer’s expectations can be quite different. For example, the law school’s computing environment has used Exchange and AD since 1999. We use SharePoint workflows for various processes and have a high dependence on email integration with the client management system we use in our clinical law program. (We are the largest law firm in NM.) Our spam filter is customized for law. I’m pretty sure that our user’s expectations (and therefore Law IT’s expectations) are quite different than those of Computer Science, University Press, the research community, etc. Is there a mutual baseline expectation of service? Sure. But the devil is in the details and other than the assumption we all should have that relying on an enterprise service means *at least* the same level of service we currently provide, if not better, it’s hard for me to imagine that listing Law’s specific needs would benefit the greater UNM community. However, we do have the start of a Law-specific email SLA (about 9 pages worth) but it’s more along the lines of “here’s what we do now that we would continue to need” and quite frankly, I don’t have time to get it ready for public viewing right now.

I also echo wvaldez’s (Walter Winegar-Valdez) comment that enterprise services are dependent upon departments having their own SLAs indicates that our departmental SLAs are somehow the foundation that enterprise services build upon. Perhaps the intent of the statement was Central IT has the expectation that departmental IT can and will provide baseline services but isn’t the idea of an enterprise service that all departments can use it? What about departments without any IT staff? It just seems a little weird.

I am very concerned about the blanket statement about the apparent considerable latitude UNM IT has to bill departments if UNM IT somehow determines (apparently on their own, without input from the department) that an issue is due to “lack of Department staff knowledge, planning or poor UNM implementation practices”. Should the department benefiting from that finding really be the ones determining it? Very scary thought.

Those are just my thoughts on a Tuesday afternoon. I’m sure more will come to me later.

Cyndi Johnson
School of Law