Every organization is looking at understanding IT performance. As a department, IT should be vigilant at applying information processing capabilities that benefit the business. In order to meet this requirement IT must provide the following services while managing costs and prioritizing requests to optimize value:

• Operate and support the infrastructure required to process, store, secure, and communicate information
• Operate and support the business applications that process information
• Provide technology consulting, training, and planning services
• Employ, train, and deploy staff required to provide these services
• Plan, develop/purchase, test, and implement new infrastructure or software to fix problems or
• provide enhanced information processing capabilities to the business

Every organization will have slightly different metrics for measuring IT performance. For my organization I have decided to report on the following:

• Helpdesk tickets –Number of open vs closed
• Network outages – Number of hours wan circuits are down vs SLA
• Software development life cycle (SDLC) – Number of projects in each phase of the SDLC and average times in each stage.
• Email – # of emails entering the organization vs being blocked due to spam, virus, etc.
• Equipment uptime – Average equipment availability
• Project budget – Approved estimated budget vs actual and % completion
• Application performance – average availability

Some of the metrics represent averages while others are reported in the form of a graph. I have decided to  report these metrics on a regular basis (monthly is the minimum recommended reporting period),so that I can spot  trends across the reporting periods. In some cases the trends are more important than the actual value. No averages can hide significant problems. Some of the data elements are designed to identify significant problems that may go unnoticed by simply reporting averages. So in some instances I am capturing specific data points with a roll up.