Is an intra-organization SLA a waste of time?
Is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your users a waste of time. As far as I’m concerned the answer is yes. I’m sure there are folks that will come up with all sorts of “it depends on the situtation” answers to the question, but I’d say that for the most part those folks are, either detached from the day to day maintenance of whatever is trying to be measures, or untrusting of the people who are charged with those duties, or perhaps a little of both.
Just so everyone is on the same page let me start with some assumptions. An SLA is an agreement with your customers (whomever they may be) that you will maintain a certain level of service. It’s a contract that both sides agree on, one side attempts to maintain the terms and another enforces those terms. When dealing with a vendor, an ISP or hosting service (I come from a tech background so we’ll stay in that field) an SLA may be necessary. It gives the customer potential recourse if the vendor fails to meet the terms of the contract. But when talking about departments within an organization creating SLAs with each other I’d argue that any time spent on creating and attempting to montior or enforce an SLA is wasted time better spent doing just about anything else.