CIOs need to make sure IT metrics align with business users’ expectations.
Once your IT organization aligns with business users’ needs and commits to the journey of achieving those business objectives, you can then determine how to do that. After determining your strategy, you’ll then establish metrics to measure IT’s performance. As Winston Churchill advised, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” But if yours is like most organizations, the probability is high that your metrics will measure the wrong things.
The CIO community invented service levels to measure performance. And for the last 20 years, organizations systematically established IT metrics and implemented the disciplines that reflect the promises IT made to the organization. Good intentions, but here’s the problem: Almost all IT service levels or metrics measure the performance of functional disciplines.
