[AFRINIC-rpd] AfriNIC and SLA's

Tue Jan 15 16:11:11 UTC 2013

Hi Gift,

I actually like these additions as well.  I think the other thing I would
like to see, but I am not sure if an SLA discussion is the right place for
it, is far more transparency on the financial reporting at AfriNIC.

Integral to the functioning of this organization and to the uptake of
address space are the fees which we, as community members pay AfriNIC.
Those fees are set independent on the community by the board, and I have no
issue with this, I am not convinced at all that a board should micromanage a
company.  That being said, it is the responsibility of the board to provide
transparent and accountable financials back to the community, so that the
community can assess the financial health of the company.

At this point in time, I am not seeing what I believe to be such
transparency from AfriNIC.  Ideally speaking, I would like to see AfriNIC
publically release their full audit reports each year on time, as well as
give a detailed and non-obfuscated financial report back, as well as a
detailed annual budget, produced on time.   Typically in good corporate
governance terms, such reporting would include information such as director
remuneration, detailed OPEX reports, any major CAPEX expenditure items,
reports on staffing cost etc.  

Not only do we need the SLA's that I referred to and the items you listed
below, but overall, and as highlighted very loudly in Tanzania, the
corporate governance aspects of AfriNIC need to be carefully examined and
corrected, because I strongly believe that we, as members of this community,
should be demanding the highest standards of governance from an organization
as critical to this community as AfriNIC is, and at current, we are not
doing so.  That makes us as a community responsible for the lapses in
governance that are so blatantly obvious, because we are not demanding
change.

Andrew

From: gift [mailto:gift at itibots.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 6:00 PM
To: Andrew Alston
Cc: rpd at afrinic.net
Subject: Re: [AFRINIC-rpd] AfriNIC and SLA's

Hi Andrew 

I like your thinking and add that the matter should start with overall
business strategy regarding many strategic issues/KRAs such as

- resource allocation (v4,v6) eg  how can uptake be influenced rather than
wait for events to unfold?
- client/customer service i.e the SLAs you refer to
- customer growth - can penetration be influenced on a country and
continental basis and how?
- productivity
- capacity utilization

There must be smart objectives, targets, benchmarks on industry best
practices as well as performance measures that will help stimulate
organizational performance taking into account all the challenges and
opportunities in the operating environment.

Regards

Gift

On 15/01/2013 05:03 PM, Andrew Alston wrote:

Hi Guys,

So I've been thinking, and before I attempt to push this into policy form, I
want some community input and opinion.

It is my belief that AfriNIC is at its heart, a service organization, they
provide services to a community of members, which is represented on this
list.

Now, as with many service organizations, I believe that such organizations
should be bound by service level agreements.  I am not referring here to a
penalty based approach, I am talking about a fixed reporting mechanism by
which the community of members can evaluate the performance of their
registry, and can then push for improvement where it is seen to be needed.
(Penalty based SLA's are proven ineffective and in any case there is no real
way to apply them to an organization such as this one).

Therefore, what I would like to see is as follows:

A monthly reporting mechanism from AfriNIC that details the following:

a.)    How many tickets were logged with AfriNIC in the previous 30 days

b.)    What the average turnaround time was for aforementioned tickets 

c.)     Where the tickets involved the allocation of new resources, what the
turnaround time for allocation of v4, v6 and ASN resources were (broken down
into these three categories)

d.)    What the total IPv4 and IPv6 space allocated was during this period

e.)    If there was any space redeemed or returned to the registry, how much
space was it

f.)     Any other issues of pertinence to service delivery to the community.

Then, I would like to see AfriNIC give us target service levels,
particularly in regards to (b) and (c), and if they fail to meet these
targets, explain to us on a monthly basis why the targets were not met, and
what is being done to improve the service levels.

At a previous organization for which I worked, we had a mechanism loosely
called the SLARG (SLA Reference Group), that defined the actual terms of
reference, and I would encourage the formation of something similar within
AfriNIC, with members of the community involved to formulate the targets.  

The only way to improve the efficiency and performance of our registry to be
able to, as a community, evaluate if the allocation of resources, which is
their primary function, is happening in an efficient manner.  So, let's
start talking SLA's.

Thoughts?

Andrew

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