CHAPTER 2: THE BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE ON YOUR IT

Oh would some power the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us. To A Louse (Robert Burns, 1786).

Before diving into the business’s interest in IT measurement, let’s consider some business perspectives on IT. The business’s perspectives aren’t always comfortable for the IT provider. All the business wants is for the required IT to be there whenever needed, for the price to represent value for money and for changes and problems to be dealt with efficiently: surely not too much to ask? Yet the providers can seem not very understanding, defensively hiding behind the contract: ‘our stats show the service is fine’ when the users would regard it as anything but fine.

Actually, in many businesses that particular ‘want’ is only a starting point; IT is also expected to enable business change by allowing things to be done more efficiently, or by allowing completely new things to be done. Let’s walk before we run, though, and hide that complexity in the words ‘required IT’.

As we shall see later, measurement provides a common language that helps client and provider to understand each other’s point of view, to be clear about what’s actually going well, to see what their differences are and to do something about it.

For now, let us listen to some ‘customers’. Although the comments in this book are in no case a single individual’s, everything quoted has been said within your author’s hearing, by real people in equivalent roles. In case you think one of them is you, he has rubbed shoulders with many people in many different organisations!

A business manager comments:

I’m absolutely fed up with the company that runs our IT.

When you phone up the help desk, they’re polite enough but you get nothing but platitudes. They’re getting slightly better now at twigging that when they get 20 calls about the same thing that it actually is the same thing. But they still haven’t woken up to the possibility when they get 20 calls that it might be serious – please fix now! I’m working my socks off to immovable deadlines (like, 20 minutes from now) and they’re not sure if the disaster unfolding before them needs to be given priority, but they’ll ask our customer services rep when the rep gets into the office in the next hour or so. Well thank you, I’ll just get on with having a nervous breakdown while we wait.

Then there was that six-hour ‘non-availability’ in November. Our money was pouring out and no income was coming in. Goodwill was haemorrhaging, our reputation in tatters. ‘Sorry’, the company said. ‘We took a while to realise how serious it was and our plan to honour our obligation to have you up and running in 30 minutes didn’t work as we’d intended’. That’s if you believe they had a plan. Hopefully somebody has made sure they have one now and hopefully it works. But, on past performance, I have no confidence. I haven’t been overly impressed with our own IT department’s ability to manage this company either. The company just seems to be getting money for old rope.

They sent out their customer director a couple of weeks ago to spend a day with us. She was really understanding and she’s pledged to get things done in the company. The question is: will she?

I don’t suppose I’ll ever get a chance to decide who provides our IT. But if I do ever get any influence over it, I’ll do my utmost to bring in somebody else.

Seem familiar?

Not everybody rants like that, but IT is an emotive subject.

When your author and his team were thinking about developing ITIL 25 years ago, we were concerned about ‘growing dependence on IT’. We had no idea, though, just how dependent organisations and their staff, customers and stakeholders would be on IT. Lose the connection to the Internet and many people can scarcely do business; lose IT completely and the staff may as well go home. Reputations, services, profitability and careers all hinge on being able to rely on IT.

So, first and foremost, business managers want:

• their IT to be on-stream and working ‘as advertised’;
• to know, when things go wrong, that they’ll be fixed quickly. Minutes of deprivation may be a fact of life; hours of deprivation are unacceptable;
• chronic problems to be addressed. Where the service ‘as advertised’ isn’t dealing effectively with chronic problems, they want something to be done.

A finance director comments:

We weren’t party to the setting up of this IT contract; we’re just a minor user of our holding company’s contract with company A. Frankly, I’d never have agreed to it.

The service itself isn’t too bad. The company more or less meets the terms of the contract, although I know quite a few of our users grumble about the service. I say ‘more or less’ because there was one spectacular six-hour break a few weeks ago that excited our Board and left quite a lot of people very miffed. Most people are just resigned to this kind of thing being a fact of life. They don’t forget, but they quickly put it behind them.

We’ve also had complaints about their help desk being ‘nice but dim’: lovely people, but ineffective at getting problems dealt with.

What really gets my goat though is that I know we’re being ripped off. We’re paying for fat-cat executive salaries, for sales and marketing that are of no interest to us and for company profits being channelled back to corporate headquarters.

When you look at the cost of a desktop (well it’s a laptop these days, actually) it’s astronomical. Thank goodness we aren’t in the public sector because I’d hate to be asked a Freedom of Information [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/contents] question about this; we’d look really stupid. As it is, I just can’t believe we’re paying so much.

Are you being ripped off?

Uncomfortable question, isn’t it? If only there were a gauge you could use to show you if you’re getting value for money. It’s not that simple, of course, any more than it’s simple to know if your car’s fuel consumption is economical. In fact, the car example is simpler because experts can test different cars in the same conditions, so enabling like to be compared with like. Unfortunately, you can’t take your IT to a test site and compare its value for money with other people’s IT.

The costs of your IT will depend on what’s expected to be covered. Typically, the operation and support of infrastructure and supported applications are covered. If you break the costs down that way, it makes it easier to compare like-for-like with other organisations. The acquisition and tailoring of new applications should be costed separately and so may be charged separately. Changes above a minimum level are also likely to be costed and charged separately. And therein lies a tale in its own right.

At one time, it was legendary that IT outsourcing companies would bid low and make up for the shortfall through charges for the inevitable changes that clients would always need. Don’t be fooled that this practice has disappeared! Guard against it through your skill and your understanding of the market.

Finance directors are most interested in:

• IT units costs in the steady state;
• cost of changes;
• whether the above represent value for money.

Programmes and projects

IT enables us to change the way we work – faster, cheaper, more efficiently and in a more customer-friendly way – and to do new things. So, inevitably, we need to buy or develop new applications. The acquisition projects delivering these applications are prone to lateness, cost overruns and scope change, which aren’t always the fault of the provider. They often sit within a programme designed to bring about IT-related business change. In other words, it isn’t just a matter of delivering software, there will also be a need for business process changes, user readiness, go-live planning, and so on. Programmes and projects present client businesses with a whole new set of management challenges that measurement supports.

A business manager comments:

What a shambles. The project manager going on and on and on about how clever he was and how he’d never delivered a late project. ‘Pity about the suppliers’, he said, ‘incompetent and showing precious little commitment’. He had the project teams working night and day to get the software in on time. ‘The project was 110 per cent successful and reflects very well on us as an organisation. Let’s invite the press in to let them see how good we are’. But wait a minute. The business wasn’t happy: it was the wrong answer delivered early and it would never work, not even if we got everybody to stand on their heads. The project manager just couldn’t see it. To him all that mattered was delivery on time and to quality.

The business (the Board) is interested in:

• successful IT-enabled change programmes, with
• projects delivering to time, to budget and to quality (or rather to its ‘need’, without going over budget or delivering too late).

Strategic alignment

If you run your own IT, it’s pretty straightforward for the Board to set a direction for IT that aligns with where the business is heading and that will give the business a helping hand. If somebody else runs your IT, the two sides need to understand each other’s direction well enough to decide whether to keep the relationship going, fine-tuning it if needed, or to consider a parting of the ways. The business requirement for IT will change over time, as the business and supporting infrastructure and technologies evolve. The existing provider can only stay credible if it keeps pace with changing needs and opportunities – reacting to what the business wants to do and how it wants to use IT, and proposing solutions to business needs that are both stated and unstated.

The business is likely to be interested, as a minimum, in:

• the provider’s strategic IT capability being maintained;
• the effectiveness of two-way communications to ensure business and IT alignment.

Pulling it all together

Figure 2 shows in simple form how measurement can be used in several ways to assess and improve your IT, starting at the top right:

• to direct its improvement;
• to intervene when things need to be corrected or changed;
• to demonstrate performance and/or justify cases for more resources, etc.;
• to show progress against strategy implementation and validate direction of travel.

Figure 2: Why measure?

When your organisation has mastered IT measurement, you’ll be able to devise your own measurement framework, linked to your own business and IT needs.