We have written frequently about service levels in our GAIT newsletter - what they are and how they will enable us to better manage service delivery.  We are now beginning our transition to the use of service levels, the fourth of our transitions following IT infrastructure services, managed network services and the Consolidated Service Desk.
 
A total of 103 different service levels for both IT infrastructure services and managed network services are being phased in over the next few months.  They will move us from events-based management to data-based management.  This week, we began providing more detailed briefings about service levels as part of our regular, one-on-one meetings with customer agencies.  The presentation we are using for the briefings is available on the GTA Web site.
 
But we are not waiting for service levels to begin analyzing data about the performance of our technology providers.  We are already seeing operational metrics for many components of service delivery, such as:

• Service Desk call volumes,
• percent of calls answered within 60 seconds,
• percent of abandoned calls,
• mean times to resolve Severity 1, Severity 2 and Severity 3 incidents, and
• order volume and average time to create an order.

Operational metrics provide a snapshot of vendor performance either daily or weekly, while service levels are "lagging indicators" with clearly defined expected and minimum performance levels.  Many service levels also carry financial penalties if they are not met.
 
We have begun to share operational metrics with agency leaders, and those metrics are confirming what we said many times: a dip in service delivery would occur immediately after transition, but it would soon be followed by steady improvement.
 
Although we are seeing these improvements take place, we know issues still exist, and we are working daily with our customer agencies and technology providers to address them.  Operational metrics are playing a critical role.  They are providing solid data for making sound decisions about corrective actions and for documenting the results.
 
As always, thank you for your continuing support.

Patrick Moore
State Chief Information Officer
GTA Executive Director