Conversations from the Mirror42 Team

According to our KPI Library community members the following KPI categories have the highest priority.

1. Service levels

KPIs may be used to measure (quality of) service levels of IT services such as network, applications, storage, email, etc. Examples of service levels are availability, performance, service failures, customer satisfaction, and (customer) support levels.

2. Finance

KPIs may be used to measure and monitor the financials of IT. Examples of finacial KPIs are costs of support, cost of units of IT services, cost of innovation, budget variances, Return on Investment (ROI), and asset value.

3. Maintenance and support

KPIs may be used to measure and monitor work related to keep existing IT services running as required by the business. Examples of KPIs in this category are workload (on e.g. incidents and changes), size of overdue work, and size of to-do queues.

4. Innovation

KPIs may be used to monitor IT innovation i.e. the delivery of new services in programs and projects . Examples of KPIs are budget and time variances, Return on Investment and Net Present Value, and resource utilization.

5. Security

KPIs may be used to measure IT security based on KPI such as detected intrusions and attacks, cost of patch management, latency in virus and spyware updates, and stopped and unstopped email spam.

6. Business to IT benchmarks

KPIs may be used to measure and benchmark business to IT ratios such as percentage of IT Budget to Total Revenues, percentage of outsourced labor and percentage of IT time invested in investment/innovation.

7. Human resources

KPIs may be used to manage the human capital in IT. Examples of KPIs in this category are average time and costs to recruit, absence rate, employee satisfaction, percentage of overtime and staff turnover.

8. (Out)sourcing

KPIs may be used to manage and control (out)sourcing based on costs, service levels, customer/supplier satisfaction.

9. Software development and quality assurance

KPIs may be used to measure quality of software development. Examples of KPIs in this category are number of defects in production, percentage of overdue software requirements, and percentage of work used for fixing bugs.

10. Compliancy

KPIs may be used to control compliance for e.g. Sarbanes Oxley and ISO 27002 (information security). KPIs in this category are used to verify compliance.”

This top 10 was brought to you by Mirror42 with usage data taken from KPI Library

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.

We at Mirror42 wish you all the best for 2008. We hope you know where your towel is.

Interesting article on Information Security and the lack of quantifiable metrics. I like the following paragraph:

“Regardless of legal compliance, it is a pretty good idea to be able to measure the adequacy of in-place security controls, policies and procedures anyway. How else do we know if our existing controls are giving us any benefit or if we have shortfalls?”

The article makes also some reference to possible source of metrics for Information Security that might be of interest for anyone currently in the process of defining those kinds of measurements.