Conversations from the Mirror42 Team

Canaries in the Coal Mines: Miners always kept a canary with them in the coal mines because the birds were so much more sensitive to air quality than the miners. If the canary was alive and singing, the miners worked. If the canary was dead or dying, the miners knew to immediately evacuate the mining shaft.

This article explores the use of so-called “canary metrics”.

This post by Stacey Barr describes some ideas to the reduce cycle time of performance measurement implementation.

The sooner you have your colleagues using measures they value, the faster you’ll ramp up the performance culture and the faster everything else will improve!

In trying economic times, most IT departments are faced with shrinking budgets. How do IT executives determine where to cut costs without significant impact to business continuity and IT availability? If they have already implemented IT Performance Management best practices, they can simply turn to their executive dashboards and analyse their Key Performance Indicators.

Where should companies be looking for cost reduction? What questions should they be asking?

• Which SLA’s are easily and consistently met and over-performed? Can we maintain quality with fewer resources?
• Which projects are not going to deliver an ROI in the next 12-24 months and should be reviewed in light of revised priorities? Can we stop them?
• Which of my external resources / suppliers / outsourcers have the worst cost/quality ratio? Can we renegotiate the contract or replace them?

For IT organizations that do not have KPI trend analysis in place, answering these questions is far more difficult. Now is the time to implement KPI trend analysis. If you do, you’ll be far better equipped to make sound decisions and effectively manage supplier performance if you are considering outsourcing as a way to reduce costs.

I know what you’re thinking: doesn’t implementing IT Performance Management require big investments in time, resources, and capital? If you go about it with a traditional Business Intelligence stack, the answer is YES. However, there is an alternative. Mirror42 OnDemand delivers IT performance management as a service - you no longer need to invest in software, hardware, and maintenance or worry about keeping your application up and running. With Mirror42 OnDemand, you can simply use your executive dashboards to make sound financial decisions based on facts, not guesswork.