Making IT personal for 25 years
Seven companies set to participate in TTT’s Start-up Draft Combine
June 29, 2026
Imagine opening your monthly report from your IT vendor.
Every number is green.
Questions were answered on time.
Systems were up and running.
By every measure in the contract, your technology provider did exactly what they promised.
Then you walk down the hall and hear a different story.
Your accounting team says the financial software crawls every month-end.
Your sales manager says the customer database keeps dropping connections.
Your newest hire is still waiting on system access two weeks after starting.
The answer is that both things are true at once, and the gap between them is where productivity and competitive advantage are won or lost.
The framework that closes it is called an experience level agreement, or XLA.
An XLA is not just a contract mechanism.
It is a governance posture that holds technology accountable for its impact on the business; gives leaders and vendors a common language for feedback; and, for companies that embrace it, becomes a meaningful competitive differentiator.
What your IT vendor is actually measuring
Most businesses that outsource IT operations do so under a service level agreement, or SLA.
Think of an SLA as the performance contract between you and your vendor.
It spells out what the vendor is responsible for delivering and what happens if they fall short.
SLAs measure straightforward things:
- Was the system available?
- How quickly did the help desk respond?
- How fast was the problem resolved?
These are reasonable things to track, and SLAs have worked well for decades because they give businesses a measurable way to hold vendors accountable.
The limitation is equally straightforward: SLAs measure what the vendor did, not what happened to your business as a result.
A ticket can be officially closed in under an hour and still leave the employee without a working solution.
A system can be online and technically available while running so slowly it adds hours of frustration to every workday.
SLAs answer the question: “Did the vendor show up?”
They do not answer the question that actually matters: “Did our people get what they needed to do their jobs?”
When good numbers hide real problems
Here is a scenario that plays out in businesses of every size.
A company invests in a new software platform.
The vendor’s monthly reports show green checkmarks.
But six months in, adoption is poor, employees have built workarounds and the finance team still uses spreadsheets for things the new system was supposed to handle.
Nobody complains to the vendor because the system is technically working.
It does not show up in any SLA report because the SLA was never designed to capture it.
For smaller businesses, the stakes are not hypothetical.
A team of eight losing 20 minutes a day to a difficult system loses nearly a thousand hours of productive capacity a year.
The harder question is what failed ERP adoption costs a 20-person firm over 18 months or what the liability looks like when a customer-facing application quietly degrades for half a year before leadership connects the dots to lost business.
Without a framework for measuring experience, the losses do not show up all at once.
They accumulate quietly, with nothing in the monthly report to explain where they went.
The costs do not stop at lost hours.
Employees who fight their tools eventually stop fighting and start leaving.
Customers who hit friction in your systems make quiet decisions you never get the chance to reverse.
If no one owns the experience, no one fixes it.
The organization pays the consequence either way.
What an XLA measures instead
An XLA shifts the focus from what the vendor delivered to what your people actually experienced.
Rather than tracking whether the system was available, an XLA asks whether employees found it easy to use and whether it helped them get their work done.
The measures look different: employee satisfaction with IT support, whether issues were resolved in a single interaction rather than requiring repeated follow-up, how confident users feel in the tools they depend on daily.
| SLA: What the vendor did | XLA: What your business got |
| System was available | Employees could do their work |
| Ticket was responded to quickly | Problem was actually solved |
| Issue was resolved on time | Employee did not have to call back |
| Software is running | People use it confidently |
An XLA is not something you simply bolt onto a vendor agreement.
The SLA covers what the vendor delivers.
The XLA covers whether the business gets value, and that question does not belong entirely to the vendor.
Your vendor can own system reliability, response quality and how quickly problems get resolved.
Your organization owns adoption, training and whether leadership is creating the conditions for technology to succeed.
The XLA is a governance posture before it is a contract mechanism, and it only delivers results when the business accepts its half of the accountability.
Why this matters more now
Ten years ago, most business technology either worked or it did not.
Today, the software your employees use is deeply woven into how work gets done.
Accounting, sales, operations, customer service and communication all run through digital systems that require real engagement from your team to deliver value.
More businesses than ever rely on outside partners to manage those systems, which creates a governance gap when vendor contracts are built entirely around technical checklists rather than business results.
The competition for good people is real, and the experience employees have with their tools affects how they feel about their jobs.
Businesses that equip their people well retain them.
Businesses that burden their people with unreliable technology pay for it in ways that rarely appear on any report.
A simple way to start
Introducing experience-level thinking does not require renegotiating contracts or building a complicated measurement program.
Once a quarter, ask your employees a handful of direct questions:
- Are the tools you use making your job easier or harder?
- When you have a technology problem, does it actually get fixed?
- Are there things you work around because the system is too slow or difficult?
Gathered consistently and shared with your vendor, this feedback changes the nature of the relationship.
Review technical performance and user experience together in the same conversation and include people from across the business, not just IT.
Three mistakes are worth avoiding: adding too many measures at once, picking metrics that nobody connects to real outcomes and running surveys that are never followed up on.
The last one is the most damaging.
If feedback does not visibly change anything, people stop providing it.
Start asking better questions
Your vendor’s monthly report tells you whether the lights stayed on.
It cannot tell you whether your people are productive, whether your technology is pulling its weight or whether your vendor is genuinely invested in your success.
In subscription-based relationships, a vendor can satisfy every SLA metric while coasting.
An XLA changes that dynamic.
It creates a feedback loop that recognizes vendors who go beyond the ticket, surface issues before they become problems and bring ideas your checklist would never have asked for.
The monthly report scores compliance.
An XLA scores partnership.
The question is not whether your vendor is meeting the contract.
The question is what your business is losing while you wait for a problem to show up on a report that was never designed to find it.
Missed adoption, degraded customer experience, disengaged vendors, preventable failures.
These are not contract violations.
They are lost opportunities, and they compound quietly until a competitor who is measuring the right things pulls ahead.
An XLA is how you stop paying that cost without knowing it.
An XLA is simpler than it sounds and more demanding than it looks on paper.
It is not a contract document.
There is no standard form, no clause to add, no agreement to countersign.
It is a leadership decision to stop accepting the monthly green dashboard as the full picture, to start measuring whether technology is creating value for your people and to hold both your vendor and your own organization accountable for the answer.
Build that habit internally first.
The vendor conversation becomes far more productive once you know what you are asking for.
