Oghenevwede Ohwovoriole
The Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has commenced training for public officers on the need to draft good Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to curb wastages in government and avoid government losing litigations to service providers.
The Director General of NITDA, Kashifu Abdullahi, disclosed this on Tuesday at a one-day workshop to train government personnel on the importance of government drafting SLA for service providers and not letting service providers dump Master Level Agreements (MLAs) on the government.
Speaking through the acting Director, Corporate Planning and Strategy, Dr. Aristotle Onuma, Abdullahi said: “We are here to understand and agree on how to draft standard SLAs in order to ensure provision of adequate warranty, after sales service agreements on our IT products and services and adequate provisions for downtime and after-sales support.
“This workshop seeks to practically elaborate on how to draft SLAs in government contracts for IT products and services. This we believe will help achieve our goal of developing the culture of the use and compliance to SLA in government IT contracts.”
He said as a regulator, the agency is always seeking to ensure the efficient and effective delivery of IT products and services.
One of the trainers, Augustine Ukauzo, said the training was very necessary because most of the service providers use the opportunity to cheat government by dumping MLAs on its personnel when it comes to SLAs.
He said: “We are training government agencies on how to draft SLAs. SLA is very essential and very technical. Most of the service providers have used the opportunity to cheat the government and in submerging SLAs into what we call Master Level Agreement (MLA).
“NITDA is taking this opportunity to train most especially lawyers in government agencies to know the importance of SLAs and to insist in having it.”
Ukauzo said the training is basically for trainees through the basic ingredients of SLAs.
“This workshop is taking them through the ingredients of SLAs, functions of SLA, so that they will be trained in requisites and minimum best practice function of what is expected of them to do,” he added.
