Measuring IT performance

GOA: The balance score card model has resulted in improved value creation and improved customer satisfactin levels of all their customers, according to N Kailasanathan, CIO of Titan industries.

Addressing a session on "Measuring IT performance" at the CIOL C Change event, N Kailsanathan, CIO of Titan Industries said that investment in IT has been going up and IT is impacting more users within and outside an organisation today. IT has moved from being a support operation to giving competitive edge. Reliability and availability has critical proportions.

"Measuring these parameters has now assumed a business critical proportion and organisations need to firmly understand that anything that gets measured, gets done", revaled Kailasanathan.

Normally projects are reviewed with reference to time, cost and returns.However the metrics are broadly classifed for finance, project, security, operations, talent and user satisfaction. Finance metrics include reviewing many parameters like total value creation, percentage of expenditure year on year and the like. In User satisfaction review, enterprises need to take into account both the executive level as well as end user feedback on their perception, number of help desk call resolution rate, percentage of SLAs and percentage of hadware/software requirement closed withing 24 hours.

Another important but often relagated to the back seat while measuring success is that of employee retention. Elaborating on this point, Kailasanathan explained that much of the enterprise success also relies on the employee morale and his satisfaction in the organisation.. Enterprises need to look into retention and attrition rate and minimize the turnover rate with recognising the top performers, providing adequate training and rewarding them.

Citing their own example, Kailasanathan revealed the implementation of Harward Business School’s balance score card model for measuring the IT performance and which is a kind of survey,that the model addresses some of the pertinent issues of finance, customer, internal users and learning perspectives. It addresses some of the basic questions of the CIO such as, how to satisfy the shareholders, what financial objectives do we need to accomplish, to achieve these financial objectives, what kind of customer needs do we need to serve and the learnings takes off from here.

He said that the implementation of balance score card model has resulted in excellent value creation, improved satisfaction levels of internal customers, helped in skills upgrdation of its IT personnel and to reach out to all their 7500 retail outlets.

CIOL Bureau