* The effectiveness of efficiency measurements
These days, it is often not enough for IT staff to keep the organization’s systems working reliably – they’re also expected to be as efficient as possible as they go about this. After all, by now we have all had it drummed into our heads that “IT has clearly become a competitive resource.”
Logic dictates that the more efficiently the IT room is running, the greater are the efficiencies that can be applied to the various business processes that the IT staff supports. High efficiency is good for business.
Such logic tends to appeal to senior managers. The challenge for many IT managers is that senior management typically uses the word “efficiency” while at the same time pushing for both revenue growth and cost containment. Now I am always among the first to recognize that profits are useful in business (after all, I am an analyst), but this means that IT leaders must constantly redouble their efforts when it comes to managing and delivering services to the rest of the company.
And after so many consecutive quarters of limited budgets and downsizing, IT managers can be excused if sometimes these efforts seem to them like an exercise in squeezing blood from a stone, or perhaps getting measurable intelligence out of a marketing vice president.
All of which brings up the question of how do you measure efficiency in an IT context? The answer to that depends on a number of things, but primarily on the answers to two questions: how cheaply can you get things done, and are the people to whom you provide IT services (the stakeholders) happy with the levels of service being delivered.
By way of example, one efficiency measurement that the storage vendors have come up with over the past few years is the “gigabytes-per-manager” metric, which tells us that it is better for a worker to manage 10G bytes of storage than 5G bytes.
Conceptually, this blinding insight – that “more for less” is a good thing – is straightforward and simple to apply: improved management software and more highly available storage hardware should mean that a CIO gets more value from the peopleware.
Furthermore, we all know that the operational expense (OPEX) associated with IT headcount tends to be comparatively high. It therefore stands to reason that in any situation of rampant data growth, reducing the need for additional personnel means we can restrict OPEX growth.
But does the opportunity to reduce OPEX really help optimize your efforts? In many instances, the answer may be “no.”
More on this next time.
