* Measuring the success of service based on cost, quality and demand
Today we look at three “simple” axes around which IT can look at its own services. Each axis is multi-faceted in its own rights. The axes are “cost,” “quality” and “demand.” Understanding some of the variables within each of these axes, and their interplay – trade-offs between cost and quality in view of historical and predicted demand, for instance – can empower IT to far more effectively take charge of its own future, and to focus business alignment discussions with intelligence and precision that would otherwise not be possible.
* Cost – Most of these parameters should be fairly obvious to many of you. Operational costs, costs of infrastructure and costs of external services are the three general categories here. Understanding costs and impacts more granularly – for instance costs for a specific application service as delivered to a set of clients, or costs of assuring a service at a .2 second response time vs. a .5 second response time – will become more and more important. IT governance similarly should shed light on how operational processes are impacting costs for better or worse, and promote a “best-practices” approach. However, many organizations are still not even solid in knowing what and where all their assets are, or have good cost accounting at that basic, “static asset” level. So there’s still plenty of distance to go before “cost” analysis becomes cut and dried.
* Quality – I’ve written frequently on quality before. “Quality” is perhaps a misnomer – though, I hate to say it since it’s an intuitively meaningful and simple term. “Customer appropriateness” is the more precise term. And the driver for understanding “customer appropriateness” – is the customer him or herself.
What does a line of business really need to perform well and why? What services are really most supportive for an organization, and what parameters count most? Is it fast and consistent application service response? Is it high levels of availability? Or perhaps the single most important factor is consistency of service quality and format across tethered and mobile environments and flexibility in accessing a wide variety of data? Or high levels of security and access control for certain data types, etc. Simply over-delivering to show value isn’t the answer – since it adversely impacts axis No.1 – costs. In the end, high quality for its own sake, and independent of real customer requirements, is something you can’t afford.
* Demand – This is the most overlooked leg of our three-legged stool, but as you know, it’s hard to relax when what you’re sitting on has only two legs. If a line of business claims it wants something, it’s all too often taken on face value.
Demand is a meeting place of accountability between IT and its customers. Ideally, it will provide IT with dynamic insights into who is using which application services and how often. Services with huge demand and demand on the upswing are probably solid candidates for investment in terms of infrastructure or service upgrades. Services that seem important but that few are using, or more likely a very constricted group is using, can be reprioritized and refocused to serve those consumers. Demand also provides a “behavioral map” of how the business is performing from an IT service perspective. It can reveal activities threatening to security and compliance policies, and shed light on intra-organization and business process dynamics that go far beyond the immediate purview of IT, but which can be immensely valuable in collaboratively tuning IT to business objectives, and even in planning business process best practices in their own right.
