Writing service levels that reflect business impact

An availability figure of 99.9 percent sounds precise, yet it says little about whether the business was able to operate. Service levels are most useful when they describe what the organization experiences, in terms its leadership already uses.

Start with the business service

Customers and employees do not consume servers or circuits. They place orders, admit patients and close the books. Define service levels for those activities first, then map the supporting systems beneath them. The mapping also reveals dependencies that no single team owns.

Measure what matters at the times it matters

An hour of downtime at midnight and an hour at month-end close are not equivalent. Weight measurements toward critical periods, and report the number of users or transactions affected rather than minutes alone.

A service level is useful when a business leader can read it and recognize their own week.

Include recovery, not only uptime

Time to detect, time to restore and time to communicate are often more meaningful than raw availability. They are also directly improvable through better monitoring, runbooks and rehearsal.

Review and adjust

A service level is a working agreement. Review it with business owners on a regular schedule, retire measures that no longer inform decisions and add those that reflect new priorities. The discipline of the review matters as much as the targets themselves.