Philippe Julio Web Blog Business and IT Value

You can’t manage, What you don’t measure !

IT Value Benefits are beyond Costs reduction, contributing to increase company's profitability
It's not easy to prove that an infrastructure gives business value to a company. I will try to answer at this difficult question.
To measure the IT infrastructure performance it is necessary to understand the performance indicator concept..


What is Key Business Value ?

• Focus on Industry : Bank/Finance, Government, Retail, Telco, Manufacturing...
• Business Value is Large : Stakeholder Value, Customer Value, Employee Value, Partner Value, Supplier Value, Managerial Value, Societal Value
• Key Business Indicators : Profitability, Revenue Growth, Customer Satifaction, Market Share, Cross-Sell Ratio, Marketing Campaign Response Rates, Relationship Duration...
• Common Language Management
• IT Portfolio
• IT Maturity

What is IT Value ?

• Business/IT Alignment
• Intellectual Properties
• IT Process Automation
• IT Performance
• Innovation
• Community
• Know-How
• Expertise
• Service Level Agreement

Key Metrics

• Key Metrics = Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Technical performance indicators : CPU, I/O, SAPS, SpecInt, TPC-H, Availability Ratio, Time To Repair, Data Loss Ratio...
• Financial performance indicators : TCO, ROI, Depreciation...
• Ecological performance indicators: Space, Watt, CO2, RoHS Ratio, WEEE Recycling Ratio...

What is Performance Lever ?
The Performance Lever is specific key performance indicator, it increases the system performance and it interacts with key indicators
It is a functional indicator, not technical !

Example:

• #Concurrent Users Indicator is a Performance Lever (Business Indicator)
• #CPU and #I/O are Key Performance Indicators
• Calculate #CPU = f(#Concurrent users)
• Calculate #I/O = f(#Concurrent users)
• Start a Provisioning Process automatically
• with #CPU and #I/O Values
• Activate #CPU and #I/O Cards with Capacity on Demand Process
• Integrate a new Web server with xVM Ops Center and N1 Service Provisioning System process
• Testing

Measuring IT Value Process
Monitor

• Put technical captors in different points of the infrastructure via scripts, software…
• Gather technical, financial and ecological indicators values

Analyse

• Integrate the native indicators values into the CMDB (My SQL for example because it's free software)
• Calculate the complex indicators with native indicators
• Analyse the results with reporting tool (StarOffice Calc for example because it's not a expensive solution)
• Compare the results obtained to the awaited results.
• Build a dashboard for CIO, IT Managers

Optimize

• Infrastructure update with analysis results