The Importance of SLAs
The methods to lower risk magnitude require situational awareness, technical competence, and reserve resources. These qualities are not commodities. Companies that can legitimately provide these capabilities are specialists. Hoteliers who expect to receive high availability response for critical systems must understand exactly what they’re asking for and the costs associated with mitigating impact to their business.
Most hotels enact service level agreements (SLAs) when signing up with a system or provider. These may provide financial penalties for lack of compliance. They often create adversarial relationships between provider and customer. What do you say to two parties who both agree a required offering is likely to fail at some point and the consequences can be devastating, yet choose to rely on a minimally engineered solution from the lowest bidder who has no demonstrated capabilities to meet a service level agreement (SLA) across its entire business?
The answer to that question for both parties is think about the constituents your hotel serves. What are their requirements? Is the SLA achievable or aspirational? What are the requirements and costs to reduce downtime from 8 hours annually to 8 minutes annually? What are the service level objectives versus the SLA? Agree to what’s required, what’s achievable and how you can realistically achieve it. Recognize the value of these services and the limited number of companies that can actually deliver with an appropriate, sustainable business model.
Future articles in this series will discuss other services that require specialization, generating sustainable growth and required services for the industry.
Service, support, and risk mitigation is one method providers can use to create value for their customers and build a sustainable business model. As more systems move to the cloud, increase in complexity, and have fewer people to manage the growing requirements for availability and security, smart hoteliers are looking for partners who can provide real value, which is rarely the lowest commodity price.
Future articles in this series will discuss other services that require specialization, generating sustainable growth and required services for the industry. Adam Smith long ago recognized that scarcity of human resources is a critical issue to address. Some 250 years before John Glenn he correctly opined, “No complaint ... is more common than that of a scarcity of money.”
So all this time, we’ve faced constraints on human and monetary capital and still seem to be pretty good at high risk high reward objects, like going to the moon – again!