The end of SLAs: why experience is the new measure of IT success

Ten years from now, it will feel astonishing that there was around a fifty-year gap between the mainstreaming of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Experience Level Agreements (XLAs).

While SLAs have been common since the 1980s, it’s only in the last few years that XLAs have started to gain momentum.

The imminent adoption of ISO 20000-18 will propel XLAs even further.

To comply with the new standard, organizations will be required to manage the digital experiences of both customers and users, integrating Experience Management (XM) into existing governance, management, and implementation processes.

Suddenly, demonstrating that your business delivers good digital experiences isn’t just an esoteric nice-to-have, but a critical part of winning new contracts.

But although the idea of XLAs has been around for a while, few organizations have the institutional knowledge of how to practically implement these changes.

Why bother with XLAs? Before that, it’s worth asking why XLAs are necessary in the first place.

Understanding what SLAs are missing is essential before starting to reformulate existing processes.

The simple answer is that what a system shows and what a user experiences are not the same thing.

It doesn’t matter if a cloud application is ‘technically’ available if the experience is so glitchy that you abandon it after twenty seconds to never use it again.

That’s not to say that SLAs are now useless.

Metrics like performance, ticket resolution times, and system availability still matter – they’re just no longer sufficient.

You need to know whether your system is functioning, but you also need to know if an application is unresponsive for the user.

XLAs offer a different framing for the relationship between supplier and customer.