“You can’t improve what you don’t measure.”
– Peter Drucker
This old adage is true in all kinds of circumstances and IT is no exception. However, it is increasingly important that organization’s explore how to make their metrics more-relevant to business executives. In Gartner’s recent blog post (How to Start an IT Monitoring Initiative), they provide some useful insights into how organizations can start down the path of implementing an IT Monitoring Initiative. But I think the most significant insight was the research predicting a shift in the types of metrics that will be used:
Gartner predicts that by 2021, 60% of IT monitoring investments will include a focus on business-relevant metrics, up from less than 20% in 2017.
This means that IT professionals need to start thinking about how the metrics they track (and hopefully report) are relevant to the business. The bottoms-up technical metrics like Percentage of System Uptime aren’t good enough anymore. These metrics need to be translated into a meaningful business measure like Lost Sales / Productivity due to IT Downtime. Sure these metrics will become more “soft,” but they help business stakeholders better understand the value that IT is delivering.
What types of business-relevant IT metrics does your organization utilize?
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