In the past, IT professionals claimed that you can’t measure the value of IT because it is too intangible. IT is unlike the other areas of the business like finance and accounting because IT is unable to evaluate their department as they do. So how do we measure the value of a company’s IT department, which metrics do we use? With IT budgets increasing and having large failures in the past, it may give the executives in the company some concerns. However, if you are able to identify the correct metrics, this can be critical for the organization’s success. Popular metrics that could be used to measure the value of an IT department could be the project satisfaction, project cost, and resource costs. Can you think of any other critical metrics for the success of IT?
Resources:
https://www.cio.com/article/2438921/it-organization/everything-is-measurable.html
https://www.cio.com/article/2955777/best-practices/12-critical-metrics-for-it-success.html
I really enjoyed reading your post on how to measure metrics within IT. I know the company I worked for, we measured the value of our team by the projects we worked on, the amount of tickets that were closed/resolved and the amount of risk we reduced. It is important that we recorded our work for our metrics so that our boss presented the information to the E-board. I believe that technology within a business has a great return on investment. Also, if we can provide stakeholders with metrics about why it is important to continue investing in technology, we can continue to innovate the business.
I think the main issue with trying to create a definitive measure of IT is that IT departments touch so many different aspects of the business and some of these aspects are not profit driven but rather supportive. When we look at accounting metrics we have different measurements for different areas such as liquidity, solvency, efficiency, and profitability. I think if we want to measure IT we need to examine the department in a similar light. We should inspect how IT affects different areas of the business individually. By looking at what is valuable to different departments, and examine the goals of the country we can better understand what is truly important to measure and try to derive the aspects needed to correctly measure IT’s value to the company as a whole.