[CWG-Stewardship] Fwd: Re: [DTA - SLE] SLE Document with clarifying background info.

[Martin Boyle]

A superlative job, Alan?  I'm feeling quite ambivalent about the discussion on SLEs.  I think that there are several things that need to be considered:

1. If we are going to hold the PTI to account for failing to meet obligations, I'd rather know that we are getting them to put their (essentially the registries') money into the right things.  We have a set of SLEs at the moment in the SoW.  Some might need changes because of the change of stewardship, but any other changes should be justified.  Just saying that the current performance is 99.999% x, so why is the SLE set at 99.9% is, of itself, not the right approach.  (That would not stop the CSC's work of monitoring the performance to recognise that the performance was slipping and ask the PTI why that was happening - sort of heading it off.)

2. More importantly, there should be a defined process for upgrading the SLEs.  For urgent stuff this could be via the CSC and an open consultation.  Other stuff would be usefully done through the IFR process.

3. Quite often failure to meet targets can be as much the fault of the customer as the supplier.  Assessment against SLEs needs to recognise this.

Hope this helps

Martin

-----Original Message-----
From: cwg-stewardship-bounces at icann.org [mailto:cwg-stewardship-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of Alan Greenberg
Sent: 10 May 2015 03:36
To: Gomes, Chuck; Andrew Sullivan; cwg-stewardship at icann.org
Subject: Re: [CWG-Stewardship] Fwd: Re: [DTA - SLE] SLE Document with clarifying background info.

Chuck (and all),

As you know, I do not work for a registry and have no financial interest in any of this. But I *DO* have a very strong interest in having IANA do a superlative job.

As long as the SLEs we are asking for are reasonable, and by that I mean are in line with what they are actually doing over the last several years, with a reasonable cushion to address future unexpected situations), and with the provision of some requests being on the longer tail of the timing curve (since there will always be a variety of special circumstances), then I think you can expect widespread support from the community.

Lesser commitments significantly below this without a rationale that is acceptable (and better than we simply want to cover our rears) are going to be a hard sell!

Alan

At 09/05/2015 09:51 PM, Gomes, Chuck wrote:
>Andrew,
>
>You clearly have a lot more confidence than I do that it will be 
>possible to implement tighter SLEs after the transition.  My pessimism 
>is based on 15 years of  experience with gTLD registry contracts in 
>which ICANN readily agreed to SLAs for registries but resisted strongly 
>to SLAs that impacted them and only more recently have they started to 
>give some on that.  Hopefully new accountability mechanisms will change 
>that in the future, but until it happens, I will be doubtful.
>
>Chuck
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: cwg-stewardship-bounces at icann.org 
>[mailto:cwg-stewardship-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Sullivan
>Sent: Saturday, May 09, 2015 5:37 PM
>To: cwg-stewardship at icann.org
>Subject: Re: [CWG-Stewardship] Fwd: Re: [DTA - SLE] SLE Document with 
>clarifying background info.
>
>On Sat, May 09, 2015 at 01:15:05PM +0000, Gomes, Chuck wrote:
> > Andrew,
> >
> > I would agree with you if DT-A was proposing changes to the
> running operational system, but they are not.
>
>Yes, they are.  The operational system includes comparisons by an 
>observer of conformance to service levels.  If you change the service 
>levels at the same time as the transition, then I can't just look at 
>the pre- and post-transition system and see, "Yep, they exceeded this 
>every month by 25% both before and after," and so on.  It's of course 
>possible to normalise for that, but it's a completely irrelevant change 
>to the transition and, in my opinion, is therefore the sort of change 
>that we ought not to be making now.
>
> > We are not talking about changing running code but rather
> changing customer service expectations to align them with what the 
> IANA team has been delivering for some time.
>
>In other words, "We're changing a part of the overall system that is 
>not directly related to the transition because we can."
>
> > Besides, good engineering should be focused on delivering the
> best possible service to meeting customer needs.
> >
>
>_One_ of the ways one does that is by evolutionary changes rolled out 
>one at a time.  At least from my point of view, it doesn't seem that 
>Verisign would be in a hurry to make many changes at the same time, 
>particularly when some of the changes have deadlines imposed by 
>unpredictable external influences (which is why Verisign has the 
>tremendous history of reliability to point to).  I should expect us all 
>to want the same prudence be used in this case.
>
>Best regards,
>
>A
>
>--
>Andrew Sullivan
>ajs at anvilwalrusden.com
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