Business Impact of Technology: 3 Key Metrics to Measure

Understanding the value contributed by your IT department is a crucial part of running your business. If it isn't adding value, then it’s a non-productive expense—and you’re losing out. During current COVID-19 crisis, business leaders are faced with many difficult decisions. But how do you effectively make decision to improve something when you don’t currently measure correct items?

 

Last week, I published a blog on 3 steps to simplify decisions around your IT department to avoid any wrong decision and make decisions based on information gathered from IT operations. I received feedback and question from business leaders that what should be measured around IT Department. So this blog is about 3 most critical metrics to measure around IT department.

 

There are so much information on industry standard metrics around KPI’s, SLA, OLA etc. Let’s leave these topics for another blog. But please note, these are metrics are to measure customer satisfaction. If your goal is to measure customer service then these metrics are great measurements. However, if your goals is to control soft cost and align technology with business strategy to impact business soft cost, then these metrics will not be helpful. So what we should measure?

 

Following 3 key metrics every business needs to measure for their IT departments. These numbers provide critical information for on-going decision process. I have also attached sample of these targets for your review.

 
Build IT Dashboards: Your ongoing IT process should include building IT Dashboards based on testing and measure critical items in IT department that impact business soft cost. You need a measured current status of all critical business services and plan/roadmap to achieve desire results. I have attached sample IT Dashboards for your review. And decision process without up to date IT dashboard is very difficult since there isn’t any information on how decision will impact business and without measuring, it will be too late to change direction during going thru any change.
 
Measure Operational Performance: IT Department is complex function and there is so much data to handle. However, collecting wrong data and making decision based on technical information will have financial consequences. Measure number that impact most business-critical soft cost not technology performance. Most business leaders agree that IT department related soft cost impacts both payroll and revenue, it would make sense that all key point setup to measure IT functions that impact soft cost. For example, instead of measure response time, measure IT impacts on hours by each staff and number of incidents per staff since this will be impact on payroll investment. Instead of measuring technology risks translate technology risks into business impact and measure business risks.

 

IT Roadmap & Strategy: One of the outcome of running IT process as on-going basis is that it build IT roadmap based on testing and benchmarks. Once you have IT roadmap, you can assign cost and resources to complete IT Strategy. This is critical document when IT strategy is completely aligned with business goals. While making any decision around IT department, business owner should relay on these plans to simplify their decision for both short or long term.

 

If you need information or would like just a discussion around this topic, send me a email or a note below, let’s discuss.

 
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