Measuring Information Technology Service Levels: a Literature Review

Due to their growing dependency on information technology (IT), firms have realised the need for IT services that optimally support the firms’ business processes. To provide optimal service performance, the firms’ IT departments must continuously manage IT service levels using suitable metrics. As IT services consist of a combination of technology, people, and processes, defining appropriate service level metrics has been a complex problem to solve for both researchers and IT managers. Using a systematic literature approach, we investigate the metrics that IT departments should utilise to measure IT service levels. This analysis suggests that service availability and responsiveness metrics are the most commonly employed metrics for approximating the IT service level. In the literature, we observe the need and trend to measure the impact of IT service levels on business performance and user satisfaction.