Trade Publication Article

How does IT measure up in your organization?

Dix, John

2010

Overview

At the top level is business revenue, product performance, those kinds of things. Making the link between IT and these top level measures can be a little tough. But we also found a powerful middle level, which is business process performance -- what's the quality, the efficiency of business processes? There's a direct link to IT there, and there's also a business process link with most executives in the company. So, what you want to do as a CIO is get out of your IT-centric metrics and talk about those business metrics. GW: It's a leadership challenge. As the leader of the IT organization you should be going out and trying to find the place where your intervention is most useful. And so if you're spending a lot of time focusing on something that's already pretty good, it's time to move onto something else. GW: A lot of work has been done on benchmarking, how well does your performance match the metrics from others. It's very useful stuff, but we're taking a different focus. We're focusing less on what the specific level of a certain measure should be -- what should your percentage of successful projects be, how much return should you get on a project, etc. - and focusing on how you use metrics to steer the conversation. The metrics are important only to the extent that you use them to have a better conversation and to make better decisions.

• Publisher: Foundry
• Subject: Westerman, George