One of the truisms of business is that what you measure is what you get.   We’ve been doing work around SLAs for rich media delivery lately and this has set me to thinking.  What is it that customers actually want us to measure?  We are all familiar with the standard SLA – its very technical, measures things that engineers like to measure and supports guarantees and penalties.  One thing that has always struck me over the years is how few customers ever claim the penalties - generally they only realize there has been a problem if the service provider reports one.  It is possible that this is because they are deliriously happy with the service but more likely that what is in the SLA is irrelevant to what the customer is really looking for.  The people who really care about the delivery performance of the media are marketing and customer service rather than the engineers who care about the performance of the underlying network.  So working with them to define the SLA makes a lot more sense than working with the engineers.

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