Information Technology Performance Management
CIO BLOG : It’s the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) to provide optimal services to Business stakeholders for Information Technology performance management. The quantification and return on investment in Technology spending need to be a priority for all responsible leaders.
These three (3) metrics : Strategic, Operational and Infrastructure can be used to measure, and analyze how the stakeholders may gauge Information Technology performance management:
Strategic Metrics |
Criteria |
Alignment of Technology and Business Strategies
|
– Are the technology goals aligned with Business objectives
– Are the IT and Business stakeholders aware of mutual goals, strategies, and execution roadmaps |
Technology operational cost as a percentage of Business Revenue
|
– Track Technology operational spending and compare it against peer organizations
– Team performance improvement for value generation |
Business continuity & Disaster recovery planning
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– The organization has measures to operate critical services with minimal customer impact in the event of unforeseen disruptive occurrence
– The Information Technology team proactively identifies a single point of failure and periodically conducts disaster recovery drills |
Differentiated services & Enterprise Architecture
|
– Information Technology collaborates with Business stakeholders to develop innovative services that would differentiate the organization in the marketplace
– Analyze business processes and simplify with agile architecture for Innovation to steer the organization to future state |
Delivery & Operational Metrics |
Criteria |
# Projects successfully implemented on time and within budget
|
– Project Management Office with governance and skilled employees to execute strategic projects
– Measure stakeholder satisfaction and continuously improve execution with lessons learned |
Maintenance cost by application with return on investment |
– Culture to continuously find ways to reduce operating spend with innovative support models
– Track costs for new application development vs. maintenance and compare with industry standards |
Project (New Business capability) backlogs |
– Understand, analyze, and collaborate with Stakeholders on lost opportunity cost
– The ability for the IT team to scale resources (leveraging partners) to deliver critical business capabilities in a timely manner |
Uptime metrics and performance statistics
|
– Compare actual vs. expected uptime (by Business Ownes) and report production downtime for all critical applications
– Perform detailed rootcause analysis (RCS) to prevent the same or similar issues from reoccurring |
Help desk / Customer satisfaction
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– Organizations should measure IT services with customer satisfaction surveys and benchmark with Net Promoter Score (NPS)
– Having skilled helpdesk personnel (with continuous training) to support your customers and measuring first touch resolution rate (i.e. number of tickets resolved by the initial helpdesk person without escalation to other subject matter experts ) . |
Infrastructure Metrics |
Criteria |
Proactive monitoring and remediation (Reliability and latency)
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– Perform and document detailed root cause analysis (RCA) for all downtime incidents to identify and prevent recurring problems, improve uptime metrics, and build a continuous improvement culture -The infrastructure team proactively monitors and mitigates hardware and application performance degradations to maintain expected uptime
|
Agile Infrastructure (On-prem vs cloud)
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– “Cloud First” strategy to take advantage of the latest technologies and provide reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure to stakeholders with continuous integration & deployment (CI/CD)
– Ability to deploy Infrastructure and maintain services at a rapid pace to meet Business changes |
License and Patch management
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– Controls to ensure license compliance and timely deployment of patches for risk mitigation
– Ensure support contracts for all critical hardware and have governance to manage end of life hardware |
Enterprise asset management |
– The process of managing physical assets and controls to monitor, approve and report all new assets for security
– Hardened image deployment on all IT assets following industry best standards (Example:CIS: https://www.cisecurity.org/cis-hardened-images) to efficiently manage and secure all assets
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Organizations need to identify the right metrics tailored to meet their business goals and strategies for Information Technology performance management. The Information Technology (IT) team needs to continuously review and improve their performance to become a credible Business partner.