Metrics

Business impact and transparency: expressing system availability

Tweet “System availability was 99.83% last month!  That’s up from 99.75% the previous month!” Sounds kind of good, no? I mean, that’s a high number, right? Right? Actually, no.  It’s not a very useful number, in and of itself. In fact, I regard the publication of uptime metrics like that as a regrettable symptom of [...]

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Financial metrics for IT: the holy grail of ROI and how it misses the point: Part 2

Tweet As I promised in my previous post on this, and along the lines of the “intensely practical” goal of this blog, we’ll now take a look at the financial cost analysis for a specific project.  This is only an example, with details changed or obscured, but it is based on a real proposal from [...]

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Financial metrics for IT: the holy grail of ROI, and how it misses the point: Part 1

Tweet Let’s talk some more about one of my favorite topics, project portfolio management (PPM). A lot of literature on PPM tends to focus on evaluating risks and returns. An excellent article on IT governance last week in The Wall Street Journal had the following sage advice: “Create an IT portfolio by evaluating risks and [...]

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‘Rithmetic: quantitative approaches necessary in the CIO/CTO role

Tweet We’ve established the importance of targeted reading and writing for the senior information technology executive. I’d like to turn my attention now to the third R, ‘Rithmetic. Even though the “soft skills” of management are probably most crucial to a successful executive, IT is one area where quantitative skills are a regular (and, sadly, [...]

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