5 key metrics for IT success

IT leaders are drowning in metrics, with many finding themselves up to their KPIs in a seemingly bottomless pool of measurement tools. The result is wasted time, confusion, and, in some cases, conflicting insights.

There are several important metrics that can be used to achieve IT success, says Jonathan Nikols, senior vice president of global enterprise sales for the Americas at Verizon. “To name a few — products and services that are delivered on time and on budget, and overall IT ROI.” The most effective approach to achieve success, he adds, is to study metrics across all adoption performance areas. “Metrics provide a means to monitor progress.”

Still, when all is said and done, some key metrics stand out above the rest for accurately measuring IT success. Here they are.

1. Rate of change

“The most important metric for IT success is rate of change,” says Nicolas Avila, CTO for North America at IT and software development company Globant.

Avila observes that many IT leaders will default to ROI as the most important metric because there’s strong belief that a good ROI is necessary to get the most out of the technology spend.

“That’s key, but something that leaders don’t fully realize is that the speed in which we can create change not only allows us to react faster, but also helps reduce our fear of failing,” Avila explains. “Failing isn’t as critical when your IT department is going to quickly and constantly change and improve.”

The rate-of-change metric helps destigmatize failure, and if failure is unavoidable, it’s important to fail fast, Avila advises. “Most companies think of failure as something they want to avoid, but really fast-changing organizations understand failures as a step towards success.”

Every leader and every team should use rate of change to determine how quickly they can turn around a particular change, Avila recommends. “Many managers are measured by their production rather than their speed of evolution, and that’s an issue in the modern world,” he notes. “You have to have a good measure of which teams need to move fast and what they are really achieving.”

Avila says it’s also important to understand that that the rate-of-change metric doesn’t only live within the IT department — it also informs business leaders. “Businesses should work hand in hand with their IT department to pivot quickly in order to maximize success,” he concludes.

2. Application delivery success

How well an IT organization can deliver critical business applications is an essential metric, says Song Pang, senior vice president of engineering at network automation technology provider NetBrain Technology. “Most modern applications are comprised of many distributed services working together,” he notes. “Each micro-service must be able to be delivered as the enterprise architect designed.”

Service delivery success relative to service usage volume is a directional metric, Pang states. “This metric becomes more successful as increasing effort is expended to reduce problems before they are reported.”

Discovering issues before they are noticed should be a fundamental goal any IT organization has, and comparing its value month after month will determine if IT is improving at delivering services.

3. End-user satisfaction

End-user satisfaction offers insight into how well IT services are aligning with user expectations, needs, and perceptions. High satisfaction leads to increased IT trust, reduces shadow IT, encourages collaboration with business leaders, and improves employee retention, ultimately leading to more efficient and effective operations, says Chris Karalis, a director with technology research and advisory firm ISG.

Ensuring end-user satisfaction begins with periodic surveys to collect user feedback. “These surveys should address multiple facets of a user’s IT experience, including satisfaction with technology devices, applications, connectivity, and support,” Karalis, advises. Additionally, the surveys should be conducted across the entire user population to ensure that no one is overlooked.

ISG suggests administering surveys annually, along with periodic brief transaction canvasses following various user interactions, such as service requests, bug fixes, and incident resolutions, to continually monitor satisfaction trends. “IT then needs to analyze the data to identify potential issues in how IT services are delivered, and which user groups are most impacted,” Karalis says. He adds that IT leaders need to address pain points with actionable results or users may stop providing input and, over the long term, become more disgruntled with IT services.

The end-user satisfaction metric’s strength lies in the fact that it touches all parts of the IT organization. “While some components face users more directly, all service areas have dependencies that impact users in some way,” Karalis says. Satisfaction metric results should be shared with both IT and business leaders, and action plans should be developed by C-level executives and IT service leads.

4. Value delivered

For organizations that deliver software, the key measure of success is the amount of value delivered to customers, says Jeremy Freeman, CTO and co-founder of engineering intelligence platform provider Allstacks. “Even if you’re an internal or service organization, you should be constantly driven by the amount of value you’re delivering to your stakeholders.”

There are a number of ways to measure value. “For SaaS companies, this may be monthly active users or customer success sentiment,” Freeman notes. “For internal organizations, this may be based on the satisfaction of the teams you’re supporting or the efficiency of the supported team.”

Focusing on the value delivered is crucial in determining IT team ROI, Freeman says. “Every business decision is based on making a sound investment, and with IT teams it’s often difficult or complex to identify the return on the actual investment,” he notes. “If you’re able to directly track the value delivered to customers, you can make very effective and focused decisions that are directly and obviously aligned with your business objectives.”

5. A combination of speed, quality, and value

When merged, speed, quality, and value metrics are essential for any organization undergoing transformation and looking to move away from traditional project management approaches, says Sheldon Monteiro, chief product officer at digital consulting firm Publicis Sapient. “This metric isn’t limited to a specific role or level within an IT organization,” he explains. “It’s relevant for everyone involved in the product development process.”

Speed, quality, and value metrics represent a shift from traditional project management metrics focused on time, scope, and cost. “Speed ensures the ability to respond swiftly to change, quality guarantees that changes are made without compromising the integrity of systems, and value ensures that the changes contribute meaningfully to both customers and the business,” Monteiro says. “This holistic approach aligns IT practices with the demands of a continuously evolving landscape.”

Focusing on speed, quality, and value provides a more nuanced understanding of an organization’s adaptability and effectiveness. “Focusing on speed, quality, and value provides insights into an organization’s ability to adapt to continuous change,” Monteiro says. “It measures how quickly ideas can be transformed into tangible results while ensuring quality and delivering value to customers and the business.”

The best way to apply this metric is by measuring the entire journey, starting from the generation of ideas, Monteiro says. “This involves understanding how fast ideas are tested through experiments, built into working software, and eventually delivered as features to customers.” The system should be developed to shine a light on each stage of the journey, making it visible and measurable across the organization. “Implementing these metrics allows the organization to become ‘dataful,’ measuring not only product success but also instrumenting and improving the work itself.”

More on KPIs and metrics:

• 7 IT metrics that matter most
• The hard truth of IT metrics
• Misled by metrics: 7 KPI mistakes IT leaders make
• Bad metrics are worse than no metrics
• You’re probably focused on the wrong metrics. Here’s how to fix that.