As summer ends and we enter the budget season, we thought it would be good to share some IT metrics culled from various sources over the years so you can see where you stand.
IT spending as percent of revenue was a more significant metric when IT was more of a backroom operation, but it is still a core measure. The rule of thumb is 4% to 8%, but of course it also depends on your vertical market. In retail, for example, the goal is down close to 1%.
* IT spending as percentage of corporate capital spending averages 50%.
* By some accounts, 80% of IS dollars goes to operations today and only 20% goes to capital expenditures, whereas 20 years ago it was more like 50%/50%.
* Average system utilization is 20%, a leading driver for grid and virtualization technologies.
* Core network infrastructure can be expected to last about seven years.
* Upfront system costs are the tip of the iceberg. Actual implementation can cost two to three times that, and in terms of managing the system over time, the initial cost may be as little as one-seventh to one-tenth of the total ownership costs.
* By some estimates, 40% of the cost of deploying new applications is integrating them with legacy programs – one of the drivers for Web services.
* Cost per hour of downtime varies greatly by industry, ranging from $90,000 per hour in airline reservation and catalog sales environments to $6.5 million per hour in financial services. Knowing how much downtime costs your company can help justify investments in everything from quality infrastructure to disaster recovery capabilities. Regarding the latter, Gartner estimates that two out of five corporations that experience a disaster go out of business within five years.
* Even with consolidation trends, data-center device growth is 30% to 35% pear year, fed in part by the move to a smaller footprint and simpler machines such as blade servers.
* The trick is adding new data-center gear while scaling down complexity. Because of that complexity, eight out of 10 failures result from human error.
* Ten years ago the help desk supported an average of 25 applications, while today it supports 200. With help desk calls costing $50 to $60 each, companies are striving to reduce application count and moving toward self-service.
* By some estimates, each user generates 800M bytes to 1G byte of data per year, and data growth companywide averages 25% to 35% per year.
Of course, these are all estimates, and your mileage will vary. Let us know what metrics you track.
