SLAs are important. They're not enough anymore.

When your ride drops you off, the app doesn't ask whether the engine was running. It asks one question: how was your ride?

IT has spent decades asking about the engine.

What SLAs measure

For years, service level agreements have been the gold standard for measuring IT performance, especially on government contracts. Uptime. Response time. Ticket closure.

Useful? Sure. But let's be real: SLAs describe what IT does. They say nothing about how it feels to the people using the service.

They're also binary. Met or missed. Which is how you end up with a watermelon dashboard: green on the outside, red on the inside.

Enter the XLA

The experience level agreement is the new kid on the block. It commits a provider to how people experience the service. Was the problem solved the first time? How much effort did it take? Did IT help this person do their job today?

SLAs are binary. XLAs are human.

Why it works

When people are happy with how their technology works, they use it better and need less help.

It changes the team as well. They stop chasing green lights on a dashboard and start designing services people want to use.

But what about ITIL?

Good news for the framework faithful. ITIL 4 puts its weight behind value co-creation, continual improvement, and outcomes over outputs. XLAs are a natural next step.

They don't replace SLAs. They complete them. You still need the engine to run.

How to start

• Keep your SLAs, and add two or three experience measures beside them. Satisfaction after each interaction, first contact resolution, and customer effort are good first choices.
• Ask before you set targets. The people you serve will tell you what matters, and it's rarely what's on the current report.
• Put it in the contract. If you're buying services, ask providers to commit to experience outcomes as well as response times.
• Review both together. When the SLA is green and the XLA is red, you've found your watermelon.

The bottom line

We've been measuring the wrong things. SLAs tell us if the engine is running. XLAs tell us if the ride was worth it.

A shorter version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn. Join the discussion there.