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Bruce- I'm going to vote DISAPPROVE on this for several reasons.1) The SLA that should be used for any such exercise should be (a) an outside market commercially available SLA for equivalent services to a business "our size" (say, 1000 employees) or (b) SLA which is an appropriate merger from responses to an RFQ for such services from open market vendors. The SLA presented here does not appear to quite be that.
2) The SLA presented does not include any mention of the the "@ieee.org" mail forwarding service. This service which has been peddled to us through the years has come to be a fairly essential piece of the services suite. This is particularly true for two reasons: (1) our constituency is a fairly mobile work force is terms of their employment and thus their actual e-mail addresses and (2) we often preclude our constituents from using their work e-mail because of employer added confidentiality notices. Therefore, I believe that both uptime and forwarding lag requirements for the forwarding service should be added to the agreement (rather than just that of the mail list exploder service). (The other alternative would be to recommend that our users NOT use an "@ieee.org" address to remove this dependency from our operation.)
3) There are no consequences spelled out in the SLA for not meeting the "specified" service levels nor are there any periodic reporting requirements.
4) I don't really believe that we can get anywhere with this unilateral exercise with our supplier because we do not have the leverage of a normal "fee for service" commercial transaction. The normal leverage that an SLA provides is to define a set of services that are provided for defined fees in a competitive commercial environment. The redress for breaching a normal SLA is either withholding payment or termination of the agreement with a switch to another vendor. We are precluded from this by the policies of both our monopoly supplier of services and they, in turn their monopoly supplier of IT (as well as other) services. Without full buy-in from both the IEEE and the IEEE-SA to real free market freedom and revenue leverage this is just an exercise in futility and a means to try to quantify our ongoing frustration. as such, I do not believe it is worthwhile.
5) "A" real (partial) road to reform would be to just grant Sponsors freedom from compulsory nature of clause 5.4.3 (ref 2010 SASB OM) which locks us into myBallot and let us instead meet functional requirements for balloting and comment handling (I would actually be willing to let them handle the ballots) via an audit through AudCom in the same way we qualify the rest of our procedures. I believe that the way in which we are locked into this truly mediocre system generates a disproportionate share of the frustration.
I understand the motivation for putting this proposal forward and I am most deeply sympathetic with your frustrations and motivations for doing so. I am fully aligned with those. It is just that I do not think that approving this vote will be constructive in easing the source of those frustrations.
Sincerely,
Geoff
On 22/12/10 7:54 AM, Bruce Kraemer wrote:
Dear EC, Over the past several months there have been several IEEE computer system outages that have disrupted email reflectors, myBallot, myProject and the Mentor document server. These services have become critical to the operation of IEEE 802 and during Dallas plenary we broadly agreed that a service improvement is needed. Toward the goal of improving service, Paul has authorized me to conduct a 20 day EC ballot on the attached SLA. After the comments have been collected and integrated into the SLA, Paul will submit it to Judy Gorman for signature as an agreement between 802 and IEEE. EC Ballot Question: "Should the EC submit the SLA document as a formal agreement regarding computer services provided by IEEE-SA to IEEE 802?" Please use the comment attached form for suggestions. I reserve the option to close the ballot early should the results of the ballot be clear prior to the scheduled close date of Tuesday Jan 11, 2011. Regards, Bruce Kraemer ---------- This email is sent from the 802 Executive Committee email reflector. This list is maintained by Listserv.
---------- This email is sent from the 802 Executive Committee email reflector. This list is maintained by Listserv.