“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 ‘Availability across 100% of service desk hours’, for example, has been replaced by ‘availability of business analytic reports, on time, in full and accurate’.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?
It all depends on the role IT fulfils in and for the business. We think that this is increasingly to do with:
- Proactively providing the information that’s needed for decision-making;
- Working in partnership with non-IT colleagues to come up with business ideas that technology can make happen, or make happen faster, or more effectively, or more cheaply;
- Stimulating ideas to go into the strategy melting pot;
- Finding low-cost ways to provide customer insight and improve the customer experience through social media;
- Supporting meaningful collaboration within and outside the organisation.
In short, IT needs to be an active member of the leadership team, and it needs to be leading the business through the technology jungle. That means that the leading indicators by which you can measure the performance of your IT team should be around:
- Levels of data accuracy (which, confusingly, are often more reliant on the business than IT itself);
- The quality of the IT team’s collaborative relationships with their peers across the business;
- Familiarity with Web 2.0 and emerging technologies, and how to use them to good effect;
- The CEO’s relationship and faith with and in the IT Director or CIO.
If we’re right, this is a whole new set of essentially subjective measures that will require imaginative thinking around how to track them – you can’t get much further away from monitoring service desk hours. And it’s certainly a more interesting challenge for businesses looking for ways to leverage technology and technical capability in the search for growth.
