IT Metrics That Matter: How Do You Measure Success?
IT Metrics That Matter: How Do You Measure Success?
What are the IT metrics that matter? And how do you evaluate your IT system’s performance?
We talk to business leaders every day about how they measure IT. One of our usual questions to these owners and executives is how they measure success in IT.
It’s a question that always makes people think and pause for a moment. Realistically, most of us don’t have clear key performance indicators (KPIs) up on a monitor when it comes to IT.
Establishing Which IT Metrics Matter to You
There are a lot of areas in the IT business where we don’t have very specific KPIs. We think about finance, it’s pretty clear. You can measure health and you can measure success. There are universally recognized performance metrics when it comes to the financial industry.
But most people don’t have that kind of visibility or clear measurement in IT. It’s almost feelings-based.
One of the key ways CopperTree measures success with our clients is by looking at the number of issues that people have in a given month. Because, overwhelmingly, business leaders say that what they really want from technology is that it just works. We want to come in every day and do what we do and not deal with IT issues.
With that in mind, one of our core KPIs is looking at a ratio of how many issues you have versus the number of users in your infrastructure. With that number, we can tell you fairly accurately how well your infrastructure is working and what kind of user experience you have.
The IT Health Score
The other thing that we use to measure success and track KPIs is what we call our IT health score. We go through our client’s infrastructure on a monthly basis and we compare how our client’s infrastructure is set up versus the best practices that we’ve developed.
Based on that, we get a high-level health score. If it says you’re 99% aligned with best practices, for example, then things are pretty good. If you’re 78% aligned with best practices, however, there will usually be a list of things that you could or should be doing to improve your overall IT infrastructure.
As we progress with our clients, that health score is one of the key things that they look at.
If your health score is 99%, you probably don’t need to worry about IT. Things are good, risk is low, things are working.
But if the health score is 78%, that’s probably something you should spend some time looking at. It’s probably time to make some investments so that you can bring your score up to a point where your risk is a little bit lower. Those improvements will usually make your user experience better as well.
The IT Roadmap
Another tool that we use to measure success and manage outcomes for our clients is what we call our IT roadmap.
We work with each of our clients very early on in our engagements with them to develop a roadmap. This, essentially, is a plan to establish where are we with IT today and where are we going.
Where is the business going in the next couple of years? How are we going to leverage technology to help you get there?
We develop and continue to revisit that roadmap on an ongoing basis, every quarter or so. We look at that health score and determine what we can do now and what should be on this roadmap in the months, quarters, and years to come.
Sometimes we come in and there are a lot of areas that need to be improved. We stay focused on getting that score up and making it more manageable.
Obviously, we can’t do everything at once, so that’s another area where the roadmap comes in. We look at all of the things we need to do and divide them up into things that we can do today, things we want to look at later in the year, and things that can wait until next year. We prioritize the areas that are most important.
Ultimately, what everybody wants is to be able to sleep at night, knowing that their risks are managed and they have the right technology in place. They want to know that when they come in every day, everything just works.
