“Everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted” (Einstein)
What gets measured gets done, and we recently had a fascinating conversation with the IT Director of a FTSE 100 company on the topic of IT performance measures. He’d recently worked with business colleagues to come up with more meaningful measures of his own team’s performance. ‘Availability across 100% of service desk hours’, for example, has been replaced by ‘availability of business analytic reports, on time, in full and accurate’. It’s not that service desks aren’t important any more, but business analytics have more impact on the success of the business – decision-makers need timely and accurate information against which to plan and deliver business objectives. It’s putting the information back into IT.
But these are still lagging measures of performance. What are the leading measures that IT teams need to sign up to? How can you measure in advance if IT is able to deliver what the business needs?
