IT Management, KPI's and Metrics

One of the functions of an IT Manager is undoubtedly to know that the infrastructure is complying with the requirements, norms, standards and business policies.

In general, IT and IT service management (ITSM) is a data-intensive business and operational function, in most cases anything that can be recorded can be measured in some way.

We know that key performance indicators (KPI’s) and other metrics play a mission-critical role in managing an IT team, so it's also the primary way IT operations managers can show leaders how the team is performing.

Benefits:

• Executives and managers with indicators can make sound business decisions on time.
• Generate visibility into how IT services actually operate.
• Allows the identification and prioritization of service improvements.
• Provides analytical information to identify service deficiencies and problems before they result in serious impacts.
• Conviction on the part of the company that IT is managed correctly.

We reflect:

• "If we do not measure, we cannot manage"
• "If we do not measure, we cannot improve"
• “If we don't measure, we probably don't give it importance”
• "If we can't influence, then we shouldn't measure"
• "What you do not measure overwhelms you and complicates the operation"

The reference frameworks of best practices tell us that we must see the operations in IT Management as services offered to a client, for example, in the business, our internal clients, I comment that from experience I recommend that the service delivery approach must propose the institution of processes that meet these characteristics:

• ?????Have a certain life.
• ?????Have clearly defined customers.
• ?????Produce a specific result.
• ?????Are measurable in a relevant way.

In this way questions arise, for example:

• How do we assess IT contribution to business success?
• Will the company get the best prices for its servers and workstations?
• Have the software use licences been optimally negotiated?
• What is the best tool to measure computer performance?
• Is the implementation of VoIP, if it is generating savings?
• In the continuous improvement, the attention to the end user, is it in an acceptable ? range of response?
• Does the database have BI or is it a manual process?
• Is the ERP we have adequate?
• Why hasn't the virtualization project started?
• Has business continuity been compromised, due to third-party or internal failures?
• Is the bandwidth enough for the level of transactions we have?
• Technological innovation, if it is positioning us at the forefront with the competition?
• How is the IT team or function performing against operational goals and objectives?
• How closely does IT performance align with business goals and objectives, including meeting SLAs?
• How are budgets performing against budget allocations?
• The success of new IT software and functionality against operational goals?
• The impact of IT transformation projects?

We have to outline the questions towards the construction of a strategic IT plan and as it will be evaluated, the previous questions are to show the diversity of points to consider, because there are many aspects to take into account, many more, I assure you.

KPI's objectives

It cannot be forgotten that what is really important for a KPI to work is that it must start directly from the company's strategy, be integrated into the business and maintain consistency, all the data to which the KPI refers must be true, consistent and credible.

These data to which the KPI refers must be easy to extract and consult, they must be automated through computer programs, such as direct data collection systems from the devices, for example, and of course, they must be available in the time in which their life cycle has been established.

These are some of the questions that organizations ask themselves when deciding how much, when, how and where to invest in IT, for this it is essential to have certain indicators to measure performance (KPI – Key Performance Indicator).

Indeed, companies face issues related to performance and the use of technology, do we know if they are the right KPIs? And while they are relevant and allow us to measure the benefit of investments and verify that computing resources are used appropriately, some indicators are designed to measure the effectiveness of an IT investment in terms of costs and productivity, proper utilization of computer resources, are used to evaluate the strategy of the company with respect to the competition.

However, let us consider that the scope of each of them is very different and achieving a good result in one does not guarantee an equally satisfactory result in the other, this is defined in the objective, for its part the analysis of an indicator raises practical difficulties for companies, so knowing how to interpret their variations and analyse their causes is very important.

KPI's requirements

Relevant:

Since it must be a factor that really influences the business model and that, if that variable gives negative results, action can be taken quickly.

Concise:

The fewer the number of KPIs in which the information necessary for the company can be measured, the better, because it will simplify the emptying and quantification of the data obtained.

"It must allow examining in depth the greatest possible number of details of the operation of the company"

Simple

Administrators must easily understand what each indicator consists of and what value it has.

Easy to process:

The process of deciphering and knowing the effect of the results obtained should be a simple and clarifying procedure.

"Each indicator must be attributable or correspond to someone who is directly responsible"

The origin and context that favours the choice of each KPI must be known by the stakeholders, IT administrators, Senior Management, council, Finance, and where appropriate include users, a large part of usability is theirs.

Correlative:

The interaction between the different indicators should lead to obtaining the type of results that are desired.

Comparable:

All KPIs must have the same hierarchy in the correlation, they cannot be subordinate to each other.

It must be made up of measures that cover economic factors and others that cover non-economic factors. We consider that financial measures are important, and likewise that they cannot be ignored, nor should they attract all the attention.

KPI Categories

KPI – Media

Traditional indicators based on IT resources are commonly crucial to manage IT operations efficiently and are relatively easy to capture, they provide basic information on purchases and the productivity of the staff integrated into the IT department, they allow checking good operational management, however, its scope is not as useful for the general management, since it focuses exclusively on the IT department and the media.

KPI -Activity

Units of work cost per person or per device include software cost per transaction, material cost per CPU minute, staff cost per function provided, and service desk cost per contact, therefore this type of KPI's, by establishing links between IT activities and those of the functional departments, offer a good estimate of the added value of IT.

The limits of these KPIs lie in the fact that they must take into account the continuous technological evolutions to guarantee adequate comparisons, for example, a CPU minute of treatment carried out on an old mainframe does not represent the same amount of work as on a new one.

KPI -Use

This category evaluates to what extent computer resources are used to effectively support the activity of the company. I confess that normalizing these KPIs is easier, which allows effective comparisons to be made. This type of KPI is usually used in activities that are easy to evaluate, such as storage, on the other hand, is often difficult to use for applications.

KPIs – Products

It differs from the other three insofar as the products make it possible to relate computing resources and the volume of business they generate. In this way, for a component manufacturer, the computing cost for each component represents a KPI based on the production of the company.

This indicator can be used to achieve the best possible components at a lower cost, in this way, they allow comparisons between companies, such as loans, insurance policies, cars, kilowatts of electricity, barrels of oil, etc., we consider that they are the only ones that take into account external factors and that provide operational information for the functional departments.

With a more structured concept of performance meters, we can establish the following items:

Infrastructure Availability

The IT infrastructure is directly linked to the time in which its resources are available, which means that it is important to monitor how much and in what time failures occur in the systems or network unavailability, it is a quite valid indicator to evaluate the performance and the performance of the IT area, specialists in the sector indicate that the ideal uptime of systems and devices must be above 99.99999%.

Total IT assets:

With this KPI, you can track and record the number of IT assets in your IT infrastructure, likewise, you can segment this asset information based on the type of IT asset, such as the number of desktops, laptops, phones, and servers.

Mean attention time

This is a metric linked to technical support, in other words, it is the time spent by IT teams to help users solve their problems in a way that does not affect the workflow and operation of the company, with Based on this indicator, the IT administrator can test the performance of each team and promote improvements or, where appropriate, modify processes that are directly impacting the productivity of IT users.

User call

It can be the first contact made by the users of the IT team, it is another support related metric and indicates, if the team is adequate to trace the source of the problems and solve them quickly, an IT administrator who follows this indicator and verifies the need for improvement in these cases can, for example, train the teams and create documentation for the most frequent problems, which we will call the knowledge base.

Number of solutions within the established period

One more indicator of the support area, is the control of the resolution of the cases, under a metric that also contributes to the understanding of the team's performance and allows the approval of management in the department, let's consider another important aspect of this indicator, is that it offers a parameter to estimate costs that impact ROI.

Bug numbers

Through the approval of system bugs, the IT administrator can identify problems in the processes, either in development or in code testing, it has been shown that a high number of failures indicates which company can improve your software development policies with the modification or the search for more efficient routines, such as the use of the DevOps strategy, which allows the integration of times to organize internal processes, we also have indicators related to bugs that can be the number of hours to correction of failures and critical situations, as well as the number of bugs -critical or not - in versions released to production.

Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction with the service is one of the most important indicators to guide decision-making, to measure and carry out this control, a communication channel with the user is necessary to analyse the feedback.

Cost approval

The approval of the costs is an indicator linked to the performance of the area, a suggestion to carry out this follow-up is to map the resources of the sector and cross-check the data with the results obtained.

IT security index percentage and incident percentage

Mapping system threats and failures are valid indicators to manage and demonstrate how secure the system is, in the same way, approving the number of incidents that occur, whether in servers, Data Centers, network infrastructure or systems digital security, are also important factors for the approval of the area as a whole.

Use of the server and/or the cloud

Server utilization is another important metric that helps to monitor and track system performance, with this metric you can track the amount of time a server is busy, I have set up in some organizations a server utilization tracking cloud as a way to measure the performance of your system.

Cybersecurity Metrics

Security metrics are a critical IT KPI that focuses on measuring the efficiency of your security efforts in keeping your systems and networks protected from security threats, so tracking security metrics is critical to maintaining the integrity of your IT infrastructure and make regular adjustments to ensure you stay on top of your security efforts.

Deployment of antivirus/antimalware (EDR, XDR)

This metric tracks the status of antivirus/antimalware deployment on your systems, as an important security metric, this KPI should ideally be 100% for your IT infrastructure to run in the most efficient and secure manner.

Number of open vulnerabilities

With this metric, IT teams and MSPs can track the number of open vulnerabilities for both computers and servers on their network, remember this helps monitor the exposure of your IT infrastructure to potential threats and allows you to devise strategies to strengthen your company's IT security posture with faster incident remediation.

Success rate of the patch to the vulnerability or threat

Monitoring the patch deployment success rate is critical to ensure your systems are well patched and up to date, most notably Microsoft Windows, well the patch success metric captures the percentage of patches deployed and helps to track the progress of the patch deployment process by your IT department and have your network capacity updated.

Days since last incident

With this metric, you can calculate the number of days that have passed since the last incident in your IT infrastructure, this helps IT teams and MSPs measure the effectiveness of strategic and technology changes they may have made to reduce the probability of incidents, for me, it is ideally exploitable because of the gap between two incidents that should keep increasing constantly to account for security updates.

Backup success rate

Another great security metric that can help monitor and improve the health of your security, this helps track the percentage of machines backed up and measures the number of days since the last usable backup, with this metric you can stay on top of your backup routine and significantly minimize the chance of losing your critical data due to a security incident.

I am aware that for its correct implementation it is necessary to have a good study and analysis of the business, infrastructure and human resources, as well as the financial support of the company.

As we delve into KPIs and IT operational metrics, we must remember that they are not the same, even though they are often used interchangeably, there is a difference between a KPI and other more strategic metrics.

As we saw, KPIs are ways to measure the daily work of an IT team, they are a specific category of metric and are often included in SLAs.

KPIs measure the performance of an IT team against objectives and goals set by it some other metrics measure the data a company uses to assess whether projects add value, resources are used effectively and IT teams contribute to operational goals and objectives.

This subject is very broad, however, it is very important to know to measure, to know what you have, to monitor and control it and verify your services, microservices, links, WEB services, etc., at the moment we start a record, it will remain antecedent.

I hope it will be useful to you, we will talk a little more about what the SLAs are and their importance in the IT position before any event.

Thanks my friends.

Sincerely,