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Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it. – Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe
How do you as an IT Leader measure success. Once upon a time a common measure was Mean Time between Failures (MTBF). I distinctly remember these figures being proudly displayed by IT executives and senior management. Bar charts and line charts reflected the degree of success an organization had in keeping the heart beating regularly and predictably.
This was a different time. A time reflective of the technological challenges and complexities that were embodied in computers. Reflective of the high degree of skill required to keep the technological heart beating. A time when working with computers was akin to weaving magic among your peers. A time when the best minds in the business thought the world as a whole would need no more than a handful of computers.
We have come a long way since then. Success is now measured in a wide variety of ways. Metrics abound on virtually every imaginable aspect of the IT organization. MTBF is still a measure, but it is ne drop among a sea of measures. This in large part is due to the wide variety of uses we have found for our computers. The mysterious mainframes of the past that lived proudly behind glass walls in climate sensitive environments are now augmented with single and multi-purpose servers, workstations and desktops, laptops, and handhelds. The form factor is shrinking and becoming more diverse. This explosion of computing power and computing devices is allowing us to explore new ways to take advantage of the computing power. Measuring success in this world has been in some ways tied to trying to keep up with technology advances, workforce skill sets, using Moore’s Law to your advantage, and demonstrating you were able to get the right things done at an increasingly lower price point.
Looking forward, we have to “helicopter up” in our thinking. We need to get to the true partnership with the business customers whom we service. Our measures of success need to reflect orders shipped, customer loyalty, channel efficiency. The assurance of the technology being as available and predictable as the dial tone on your phone is a given, table stakes as it were. The success of IT is the success of the business and vice versa.
Just as you cannot separate the business strategy from the IT strategy (it’s collectively corporate strategy), you should not be separating the measures of success. In a world where we are swimming in data and ways to measure it, getting back to the basics of why we are in business is both grounding and reflective of the highly desired partnership between business and IT. Some may say that this is simply a way for IT to avoid being measured. I disagree. This is a way for IT to be consistently measured in all areas they affect – and in a manner reflecting their partnership with business.
As a Chief Medical Officer friend of mine once told me, “All that matters are the outcomes, everything else is just CYA”.
