First my sincere congratulations for making it through an entire column without sniping at Windows, OOP or any other 21st century phenomena.
While you have characteristically turned at interesting topic into an impenetrable wall of text, SLAs and outsourcing have led to marked changes in IT.
SLAs are generally a good thing for both internal and external providers. They basically define what you are going to get and provide a tool to enforce it (essentially not paying them if they don't meet goals).
The problem with it that outsourcing brings, is that you may have no expertise left in your organisation to evaluate the SLA in the first place. You can of course outsource for some consultants to give their verdict on other vendors' SLA proposals, but it starts looking like "Turtles all the way down". You also run the risk of hiring consultants with bees in their bonnets, who see all problems through their own looking glass - yes I'm referring to you Rudy
The desire to save money, which usually results in the opposite and makes more money for your vendors is the main thing driving the cloud hype at the moment. However, rational heads see clouds as essentially exactly the same "helpful" IT department, except it's now private, deals with thousands of clients and has no responsibility for your business, besides its SLA. Better still you now have another weak point to worry about - your vendor's company, which is now inescapably intertwined with yours. No real problem if it's MS, but a real worry if it's a new cloud vendor who may go bust for any number of reasons.
So by all means enter into SLAs and even use cloud vendors, but make sure you retain some expertise in your own company to be able to evaluate these agreements.
