Based on our research and experience with implementations during 2009, we have identified the three most popular areas of interest in terms of implementing IT Performance Measurement. While some of the items may seem obvious, others also came as a surprise to our team. Please find below the three areas that we identified as the most relevant topics:

Process Reports and Scorecards
(Incident/Problem/Change process reporting). By far the most common implementation of Performance measurement is to measure the effectiveness of incident, change, problem, service availability and other IT operations related processes. These processes are fairly straight-forward to measure, and is implemented both in house by organizations, as well as by managed services providers for their customer. Metricus as a toolset has also been most often implemented for the measurements of these IT operations processes, and by now has very comprehensive and well tested KPI library as well as configuration methodology.

Projects portfolio management
(budgeted vs. Actual). Companies wish to be able to measure and report on key measures/KPIs for projects in the agreed project portfolio. The key KPIs include cost incurred on projects (budgeted vs. actual), timeliness, ROI based on agreed success measures for the projects, and reporting at the overall project portfolio level. Again, Metricus has been used for projects, programs and project portfolio related reporting, and has a rich KPI library built in, along with features which include ability to manage and report at project level from within Metricus, ability to define new projects, and ability to interface with popular project management and time sheet management software.

Financial Management and Reporting
(Cost Control/Financial Management) – Cost of Services and budget category measurement and reporting (per General Ledger) is most popular and relevant performance measurement implementation among IT managers and leadership. Organizations want to be able to report financial and cost related data for the services, along with trends over a period of time, with drill down capability. In many cases this data comes from ERP systems and sometimes from other financial or project/service/asset management software. Metricus pulls data from all the relevant sources, and presents it as scorecards and dashboards with full drill-down capability.

A couple of other popular areas where organizations are spending effort to do better performance measurement include risk, compliance and security related reports, as well as more forward looking companies looking to measure areas such as environment friendliness of IT (green IT). In terms of reporting formats, senior management most often prefers to see dashboards with drill down capability, while line managers most like to have access to reports for their specific domain.