The study shows organizations rely on spreadsheets as the main platform for IT decision making

Rotterdam, November 1 2008 "Trends in IT Performance Management", a global study on the current state of IT Performance Management, shows many businesses consider IT a black box, organizations still use spreadsheets as their main platform for managing IT performance and best practices do not provide sufficient answers on how to measure IT performance.

The study shows IT managers clearly indicate that they are looking for help in terms of what to measure and how to measure. Best Practices such as ITIL and COBIT are looked at for support but are not supplying the answers. In the tool space, this guidance is also not found and IT managers state that Service Management solutions do not provide the required functionalities. As a result 76% of IT organizations still use spreadsheets as their main platform for managing IT performance. Often collecting data from different sources an taking days to aggregate that into a holistic decision making picture. Only 6% of IT managers say that they have access to an efficiently produced report with information on the performance of their organization.

In the last few years, IT Performance Management appeared on the radar of IT organizations; almost half of the IT organizations have embedded programs to improve the management of IT performance. The drivers for these programs are: cost control, value delivery and compliance management. Programs though still are still in their infancy and IT Managers rate themselves as fairly immature. In fact, 65% consider IT a black box that currently does not provide the IT management with efficiently produced information on the performance of IT.

These are some of the conclusions of "Trends in IT Performance Management", ITpreneurs’ 2008/9 report on the management of IT performance in organizations. A total of 99 IT managers and influential IT consultants from around the world were interviewed to present a snapshot of the current state of the market, including maturity, success factors, bottlenecks and lessons learned.

“Information that is valuable for all IT professionals interested in improving the management of IT performance”, says Arjan Woertman, Metricus Product Manager at ITpreneurs.

About "Trends in IT Performance Management"

"Trends in IT Performance Management" presents the IT Service Management and IT governance domains with a snapshot of the current state of IT Performance Management. "Trends" is one of the research projects that ITpreneurs executed in the area of IT Performance Management. This first study was conducted by candidates from the Rotterdam School of Management MBA. Further studies are currently in progress with candidates from the Business School Netherlands as well as the University of Goettingen in Germany. The purpose of the research projects is to share information with the market on IT Performance Management

About ITpreneurs / Metricus

Metricus is a framework for the successful management of IT performance. Metricus provides metrics that align with the IT best practices that organizations are familiar with (including ITIL and COBIT) and provides toolkits, Scorecards and Dashboards to successfully measure performance. Metricus guides organizations to optimal IT performance using trending and analysis capabilities as well as benchmarking capabilities.

Using Metricus organizations get a clear picture of their performance based on metrics that are relevant to their organization. Metricus provides template metrics for IT best practices, such as COBIT and ITIL and dashboards for various stakeholders in the organization. This includes a CIO Dashboard, process management scorecards and industry benchmarking indices. For more information visit www.metricus.com