Aligning IT Service Levels and Business Performance: A Case Study

TSF is an Italian IT service company, focused on logistics and transportation IT market segments.. It is able to support customer´s business operations through a complex IT service chain, appraised by a Service Level Management (SLM) system. Due to the long term contractual relationship (10 years) with Italian Railways, TSF developed a symbiotic relationship with its main customer, becoming co-accountable for its business performance. This aspect has highlighted the necessity of the definition of an extended SLM model able to correlate the customer business performances with the delivered ICT service levels, in the perspective of an end-to-end service delivery chain. The paper illustrates the conceptual approach and the method adopted to overcome this problem in a pilot project.