This book is founded on research conducted at Rhodes University into Service Management and Service Agreements. The initial prompting for this research came from one of the industry partners of the Distributed Multimedia Centre of Excellence. They expressed difficulty in the development and management of Service Level Agreements.

It is important to realise that this is not an ITIL® book. The ITIL® framework is just one of many approaches that were used to develop the framework and model in this book that were then tested empirically in the research. Not every reader will be from an ITIL® background and although it is one of the better (and more comprehensive) frameworks at the moment, this book is designed specifically to be useful to all SM practitioners.

This book lays out the fundamentals of an SM strategy and describes in more detail, the contents of, and how to develop, the major parts of this strategy. Follow these guidelines and your SM initiative is far more likely to be successful.