Using metrics to justify investment in IT

A firm grasp of metrics and how to implement them can prove vital to the health of your organization-and your career. To gain support from senior management, you must link technical metrics to business metrics-you must show how increases in productivity and quality translate into a better bottom line. So your business and strategy determine the metrics you track. Select measures that are obtainable and that truly matter to your organization´s work. You also must be able to collect or derive the metrics data without undue burden. Remember that it´s not the measures themselves that matter, but the decisions that will be based upon them. Measures that are expensive or cumbersome to collect will detract from the measurement program´s perceived value. Overly intrusive or complex data collection can turn people off and encourage them to invent numbers. The best measures are those that are a natural outcome of people´s work, like the number of batch jobs processed in a day or the amount of downtime a system records