Conversations from the Mirror42 Team

KPI Library News, January 25 2008

The KPI Library community is rapidly growing. More than 10,000 registered members are currently involved in building the largest repository of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The KPI Library currently has 800+ KPIs in 50+ categories such as supply chain, project management, human resources, IT and finance.

The KPI Library offers various ways to members to participate:

• Submit your KPIs to be included in the library
• Score KPIs to rate the importance of KPIs
• Bookmark KPIs to build your personal KPI lists
• Comment on KPIs to give your opinion

It is the objective of the KPI Library to be the single source for KPIs driven by its community members. The community decides which KPIs are best-rated and most-used.

Patch 4.1.7 as an upgrade for version 4.1.5 is available. 4.1.6 is an internal patch release. To install patch 4.1.7 you have to deinstall the earlier version, because many files have been relocated.

Solved issues in 4.1.7:

• Performance issues with generate metrics
• Ability to sort on multiple columns
• Restriction on records in portlets set to 10000 instead of 1000
• Prevent double records for measurement - dimension combinations
• Prevent double records for measurements
• Change % and gap values were not correctly calculated for negative indexes and values
• Change % and gap values for controls did not take the control direction into account
• Check for javascript and cookies support before logging in
• Timeout error popup not only in monitors and portals, but also in other parts of the application
• Instances list not url encoded in pivot bar, pivot pie and pareto graph
• Better error messages when starting the application
• Create with template scrambles text when using Cyrillic characters
• Create with template fails with timeout when the database contains a lot of metrics
• Problem when copying Russian metrics to a formula
• Search for metrics sometimes returns “access denied”

Solved issues in 4.1.6:

• portals with live data and timeout do not seem to look at the commandtimeout parameter
• measurement dimensions can not be shown. Also other frames with tabs fail to show.
• installation pack does not have STARTPAGE constant in prefs.inc.sql
• metrics screen does not show metamart query on Datasource tab
• formulas with metric names with trailing spaces are parsed incorrectly
• metamart explorer does not show details of selections, functions, dimensions, fields and joins properly
• Create with template not stable with large number of services, workgroups and/or sla’s
• Performance bad in perf-metrics.asp on Oracle with large number of metrics and metricdimensions
• Not all dimensions were tested in test metamart
• Incorrectly reported missing element instances
• First record in details selection was not checked whether numeric or not
• Export of metric values result in very large xml files
• Default date to in search metric value was today, now today + 1 month
• Import metric values will introduce duplicates if time not equal to “00:00:00″
• user.asp saves user names in lower case. This restriction has been removed
• scripttimeout not present in testmetamart.asp
• input validation was not implemented on all url parameters and web form fields
• output validation was not implemented on all texts written to the browser
• now an audit log will be created in the logs directory
• restructure directories to have a dedicated web directory

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measurements, agreed to beforehand, that help an organization define and measure progress toward organizational goals. KPIs in IT management will help steer efficiency and quality of IT services as delivered to internal or external customers.

Below, we have composed a list of commonly used Key Performance Indicators for IT management based on the input from the 8,500+ members of the KPI Library community, and our experience in customer implementations. The KPI Library is a free community that provides an extensive library of Key Performance Indicators. The community contributes and rates KPIs, and therefore drives this list of commonly used KPIs.

Support & delivery

• % of service requests resolved within an agreed-upon period of time
• Cost of service delivery
• Critical-time outage/unavailability
• Customer satisfaction
• % of outage due to changes (planned unavailability)

Projects/programs

• Deviation of planned hours of work for project/program
• % of projects/programs with missed milestones
• Average break-even time of projects/programs
• % of projects with pre-defined ROI
• Deviation of planned budget for project/program

Availability, performance & capacity

• Availability %
• Average response time of application transactions
• Average % of memory utilization
• Number of alerts on exceeding system capacity thresholds
• % of failed application transactions

Measuring your organization’s success depends on identifying and prioritizing the KPIs that really matter for your organization. Therefore, for more KPIs for IT management, we suggest browsing the categories ‘IT management’ and ‘Project portfolio’ in the KPI Library. The library contains 400+ KPIs for IT management in various categories such as ITIL, Cobit, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and IT services such as applications, storage, networking, hosting and backup, and it contains 60+ KPIs for project and program management. We encourage you to become a member, and learn from the communuty and contribute to the KPI Library.