The measurement of IT in line with business drivers can help organizations better leverage its value, writes Tarun Malik
The technology landscape has changed and cloud services have matured. Business understands the benefits that cloud services have to offer and as a result, CIOs have to focus on business benefits and agility than building and managing on-premise technology investments. CIOs across the globe are looking for strategic plans and measures wherein they can partner with business for growth.
If we take a step back, every business defines a vision and drivers, sets objectives, identifies and executes key enabling programs in the direction set by the strategic vision. They monitor measurable impact that these programs make on business. As CIOs adopt cloud services, the measure and performance of IT will go through a paradigm shift. Traditional view which offers capex vs opex, operations metrics, servers, uptime, availability, and backup metrics of on-premise infrastructure will not make an impact.
As a trend, we see three key changes developing in how IT is reporting its impact to business. The first one is to align the key performance indicators (KPIs) of IT in line with that of business (for example, demonstrate IT spend, roadmap, blueprint and programs across business drivers of enabling growth, harnessing productivity, employee retention, cost optimizations, etc.) The second is to define quantifiable measurements (for example, by enabling a collaboration platform for the sales team, the number of RFP responses have increased by 10%, which is aligned to the business driver of growth; by enabling unified communication the cost saved on travel is 15%, which is aligned to the business driver of cost optimization; and by enabling consumerization of IT, employee retention was impacted by 8%.) The third key change is about how to report traditional metrics from on-premise services and cloud service in a unified view.
The framework should provide the ability to gather relevant information from within the organization and cloud services, connect the information into knowledge and provide the ability for deep insight. With technology changes, this will not only be limited to service related metrics but also help aggregate customer sentiments from social media.
Essential views
There are four essential views that an IT measurement system should focus on. There should be a CEO/COO view. This view enables the CEO and the COO to measure the impact of IT programs and services aligned to growth, innovation, and employees. Another is the CFO view. It enables the CFO to measure the impact of IT programs and services aligned to cost optimization and productivity. The third one is the business head view which enables business heads to measure the impact of IT programs and services aligned to productivity and impact on operational efficiency. And the last one is the IT Services view that enables the IT operations team to measure service efficiency on operational metrics such as availability and performance.
One of the other critical aspects for success of such a measurement system is user experience. In this age of tablets, handheld devices, and intuitive systems, there are some key trends that we have seen catching on with CIOs. One of them is heat maps, which are true representations of the state of health with visual indicators demonstrating which area to focus on. As human nature, we understand and interpret Red, Amber and Green very fast. The heat map thereby helps us focus on the areas that the CXO needs to deep-dive upon. Another is the tile-based concept, which is the latest trend. Tile-based views in software help display the latest information in summary even before click-through for more details.
Highly graphical and GIS integrated views are also in demand. Graphs are easy to understand and GIS allows them to relate better. For instance, a data center IT operations dashboard that can demonstrate data centers and services over a GIS heat map.
In summary, the measurement of IT in line with business drivers can help IT communicate its value much easily than justifying spends on servers and services for uptime and availability.
Tarun Malik is Associate Enterprise Architect, Microsoft India.
