Blackmoor Vituperative

Tech Republic has a pretty good five-minute introduction to using metrics for IT projects. This is interesting timing: I was just having a conversation about this at lunch yesterday.

Technology, like bureaucracy, is not an end in itself: it is a means to an end, and it has value only as much as it aids in achieving that end. If it doesn’t make the business more efficient or somehow create value for the business, then IT is a drain: a “cost center” in project management lingo. Technology should not be a parasite: technology’s job is to make the business better able to deliver its products or services and make its customers happier.

Too many people don’t get this. People who work in IT too often fail to see their own role in the context of the businesses’ needs, and people who aren’t in IT have an unfortunate tendency to see IT as something unrelated to them, and which only siphons money away from more important things. Sometimes it is even worse, and you have people who do not understand technology or its role in the businesses’ strategic objectives making decisions on what resources will be made available to IT and how it will be spent. This is like someone who never never leaves her house making the decision for what cars the employees will drive.

The Tech Republic video is based on a Forrester Research white paper, “Five essential metrics for managing IT“. Those five essential metrics, according to Forrester, are:

1. Align IT investments with strategic themes
2. Calculate cumulative value of IT investments
3. Show IT spend ratio — new versus maintenance
4. Measure customer satisfaction
5. Use a scorecard for operational health

The gist of this is that you have link IT projects and expenditures to clearly defined results which are relevant to the business. If you can’t measure the success or failure of an IT project, and if you can’t demonstrate that the project somehow improves the businesses’ ability to achieve its goals, then how can you make a plausible case for funding it?