The Hub Commentary_

Nice article!  Just because you can measure it, doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be measured.  Number 5 in the list is the one I snap to right away.  IT measures technology like baseball stats.  As my father always said, “baseball is a team sport that allows individuals to excel, but they must all excel at once to win the game”.    I believe IT measures technology as if those measurements prove they are doing something and creating value, when the company says, “so what?”.

The worst part about these measures is that it drives the wrong behavior.  Let’s pick on the help desk as an example.  Counting the number of calls, number of closed tickets on the first touch and the number of tickets closed in <15 minutes.  During my first software job as a professional services consultant, the first bit of custom code I had to write was for a customer to keep the help desk analysts from “cherry picking” the easy calls out of the queue and force the top of the queue to be selected.  Really?  This is because of how they are measured and we wonder why the business is unhappy with service and the end of the service desk is near according to the Top 10 Trends from Gartner.

These metrics are not driving quality or quality of service, but how many tasks I can do and how fast I can do them.  I cannot believe in 20+ years these metrics haven’t changed and it is just now that Forrester is publishing this article.  This is why IT is being outsourced and how the cloud is driving change into the organization.  See number 11 in the list and behavior.

Number 13 is classic and reminds me of my first position with EDS and a manager telling me, “you can make any chart tell the story you want to tell”.  Meaning diagrams from spreadsheets.  Yes, this is correct.  Why on earth would I push a chart that illustrates poor performance?

These measures are all the commodity of IT and why it is outsourced.  Instead of justifying and seeking to measure against benchmarks (number 9) as I was often asked as a former Industry Analyst for META Group, why not work to change the 1-2% of revenue that is spent just keeping the lights on – operating – which is what these traditional metrics measure.

Kudo’s Forrester, let’s start measuring value, driving the top line revenue with technology and innovation and improve the bottom line by reducing the amount of revenue (1-2%) that is spent just keeping the “lights on”.

How are your metrics changing with the advent of the cloud and driving value?

Michele

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In a recent Forrester report – Develop Your Service Management And Automation Balanced Scorecard – I highlight some of the common mistakes made when designing and implementing Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) metrics. This metric “inappropriateness” is a common issue but there are still many I&O organizations that don’t realize that they potentially have the wrong set of metrics. So, consider the following:  (Read Full Article…)