As companies tighten their purse strings, IT has to get increasingly wily to keep the enterprise running. Monitoring your projects and initiatives will allow you to get better ROI from those precious IT dollars. Forrester Research Inc.‘s week of panel discussions on how IT can thrive in a weak economy lets you in on seven ways you can use metrics to keep the C-level execs happy and do more than keep the lights on.
1) Communicate better
One blunder IT managers make is not communicating the state of IT operations very well, said Alex Cullen, vice-president and research director with Forrester. “IT executives often try and either hide the costs, or they wallow in the technical details, baffling the business side.”
Executive buy-in is important, so it’s best to have them take part in formulating IT goals. (It’s not their job, however, to micromanage the metrics, so they should stay out of the long-term project management except for regular updates.)
“You need to figure out how to map IT metrics into business metrics that the executives will care about,” said Cullen. “You should start at the high level and relate IT activities to overall strategic spending and make changes according to those.”
2) Tell the truth
IT managers can be sneaky when it comes time to dole out the budget, according to principal analyst Khalid Kark, leading many to tell tall tales. He said, “They’ll often try to inflate the budget, but that’s not the right way to do it.”
Another pitfall? The company won’t give out very much money if they can’t see where it’s all going—and in a way that makes sense to them. So it’s important to word any budget proposals in a truthful, simple manner that is straightforward to everyone, techie and non-techie alike.
3) Don’t be cranky
In tough times like these, IT can feel especially put upon when it comes to business demands and tempted to shoot down ideas. Said Chip Gliedman, vice-president and principal analyst: “IT is beginning to say no to everything they can, in an immediate reaction to the lack of resources. They are becoming more insular, and are getting away from doing new things—their natural instinct is to look at their own world, not tying things to the business. This is counterproductive.”
4) Draft simple metrics
It’s a good idea to stick to a simple formula, making it easy to track you progress and success levels over the long term without getting bogged down in complicated formulas. Gliedman suggests a statement of purpose like “We are doing X to make X better as measured by X, which is worth X.”
Said Gliedman: “From there, you just need to constantly reinforce how this project does to increase business value.”
Even a simple formula goal, business ROI question and metric should keep IT managers on the right track, said analyst Mary Gerush.