The Merits of Jailbreaking

A while ago I wrote about jailbreaking your iDevice. Now one of the biggest proponents of jailbreaking, and the king of Cydia, Saurik gives you reasons why you should jailbreak your iPhone. Well worth a read!

Service Level Agreements

How do you define an acceptable service level agreement (SLA) when negotiating service contracts with customers? There may be many factors that you want to manage and measure (remember: if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it), including things like maximum response and resolution time and a number of fixed metrics, such as priority levels.

There is a school of thought that as a service provider, you shouldn’t give anything away in an SLA unless it is specifically asked for. Though in a competitive market you will certainly want to offer something different to ‘the other guys’. Whether that is guarantees of quicker response times or a lower percentage of missed SLA targets before penalties apply is up to you. A missed SLA target for example may be where you have a target response time of <1hr for a priority one incident and it takes your 70 minutes to respond. Most SLAs will allow for a small percentage of targets to be missed, so long as some defined average measurement remains within targeted limits.

When defining SLAs, one thing that is often overlooked is how your supplier agreements and even internal (inter-departmental) agreements compare with the SLA your offer customers. Think about it. If you guarantee to replace a server hard disk within 24hrs but your supplier has a 2-day lead time for delivery, how can you meet the SLA? Or maybe your supplier is not a problem but your Accounts team has a policy to only pay invoices when they reach their terms? That hard drive you ordered may not be delivered until after the bill is paid, which could be 30 days down the track.

Other factors may come into play. Maybe you have a standard SLA response time for priority 1 that says you will have an engineer on site within 1 hour. If you have the same terms across multiple customers, then you are going to have to make sure that you always have engineers on standby, or at least in the office doing work they can drop if the need arises. How you schedule your engineers is key in this scenario. Keep an eye on the number of short-response SLAs you put out there and make sure that you actually have the staff to cover them, otherwise you might end up paying the penalty. Literally.

I’ve mentioned priorities a couple of times, so we really have to make sure that we have defined how we come to decide on the priority of a job. Otherwise you know what happens: The customer sets the priority of the job and it is always priority 1! How you define your priorities will be different depending on the services you are offering but just make sure that you do define them clearly. You will most likely define priorities based on the number of users or services affected in an incident, the business impact of an incident or some other arbitrary measurement. Like if the CEO’s PA calls, it is priority 1 every time!!

Lastly, make sure you define the scope of your SLA. Maybe you cover servers and routers but don’t cover printers - make sure that is clear.

SLAs tend to be full of legal jargon. Unfortunately they have to be but the key points I’ve mentioned have to be spelled out unambiguously in plain English for all to understand. For me, that is the key to executing an SLA that keeps all parties happy.

FT won't give up subscriber relationship to Apple | Reuters

I wrote about Apple's new subscription policy a little while back (Apple's Publication Subscription Strategy - good business or magazine-killer?) saying that publishers would be motivated to provide a better solution. Well it seems that the Financial Times is the first to take a stand with Apple. Apparently the media giant is 'in talks' with Apple to avoid paying them the 30% they demand for all electronic subscriptions.

Watch this space, it could get interesting .....