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IT Metrics - Continuous transformation


You have been successful managing your IT department for several years getting a good rate of project achievements and positive feedback from many of your main stakeholders. You have driven your organization to the current stable position where you believe things will remain unchangeable. You are quite confident that everything you have managed to be done till today is more than enough to give you and your teams a long run stability. Yet, picture this, one day the CEO announce to the Board of Directors a shocking information; the business is underperforming for almost two years now and he has get a last opportunity to turn around the current situation during the coming financial exercise.

You and your colleagues begin to alternate between panic, hope, confusion and in some exceptional cases, some complacency, as these few ones still believe things will not change too much. Unfortunately for them at the end of the week some strong messages are confirming the “worse” scenario. The Board of Directors are called for an urgent meeting with the CEO and the Regional Chairman where everyone is asked to prepare a detailed action plan which among other challenging figures you are asked to increase by 10% the company revenue while at the same time there is a cost reduction target looking at 25% less than the actual figures…….

You as a Head of IT or CIO has a big say as almost 30% of the current company costs are IT – Technology related. Moreover, the IT systems are considered as a key success factor for the rest of the C-level managers, hence they are already looking at you in two ways, as the guy who is overspending and clearly putting the whole company at risk, but also as the chap who will potentially help all of them implementing nice new functionalities and IT devices that will increase sales and company revenue out of the the blue…….

I’m sure most of you have been confronted sooner or latter  similar situations and then you have find asking yourself … and now what? Well, I think the obvious answer is that after a night of insomnia you have met with your direct reports, passed them the same stressing and challenging message and finally you all have started looking at whatever opportunities you might find in your minds to reach the new business targets.


Independently that the company target could be a cost reduction or a new system functionality requested by some of your C-level colleagues, the fact is that you are late. Indeed, you are deemed late and you will be seen as a person who has not been driving innovation and Technology information to the level that was required by your business. Is this a fair statement or just a way your Board colleagues used to defense themselves? Honestly it doesn’t matter!! The true is that as CIO / Head of IT we need to understand that today’s business environment are always requiring a continuous improvement and optimization of the IT technology and related investments - fix cost.

As such there are two main drivers or decision making tools that will help us along the way. The first one is measurement. We have to continuously measure our performance, quality of delivery, quality of services, level of customer satisfaction, project effectiveness, etc. The second one is innovation at the different levels of our IT process model; from the pure operational tasks till the tactical or strategic decisions we take at quarterly or yearly basis. Nothing can be excluded from doing this exercise; organization, technology architecture, processes, communication, etc. has to be properly evaluated, deeply discussed and finally renewed at regular basis.

This blog chapter is meant to breathe new impulse to the IT professionals that believe that by just keeping their good current work all things will remain unchangeable and very much aligned with the new business dilemma. This is far from what is going to be from now on the IT agenda management, no doubts about.

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