Q&A on LinkedIn: How to Define KPIs for Corporate IT services?
I was recently asking this question on LinkedIn Q&A:
How to Define KPIs for Corporate IT services?
and the Best Answer I selected, was:
I would suggest that your first step would be establish a "service catalogue" which is a list of what services you (the IT dept) provide to the rest of the organization. The key here is to not make this a list of technical components (e.g. mail server, web server), but a description of what the user expects to get.
For example: to a user, email services would be the ability to send and receive email with: a)spam filtering, b)proof of receipt, c)ability to create mailing lists, etc., but NOT the ability to perform mass marketing email campaigns (that would be another service) - the email service will likely include several servers, different software packages, internet connectivity, and more.
Once the service is well defined from the point of view of customer expectations and IT restrictions (e.g. no email campaigns) it would very important to get get the agreement and buy-in on these definitions from the rest of the organization. I would recommend a series of one on one discussions with each senior executive, followed by a group meeting that you could call the IT Steering Group or Committee, where they would all see each other agreeing to what they already agreed to in private.
If there is resistance to forming a steering group, try the argument that they already spend hours every week dealing with IT issues and that spending one hour in this meeting to get organized will cut down on the time spent firefighting.
The reason why the one on one meeting are very important is because your senior execs will have lots of questions/debate. If you get into it with all of them around the table your meeting will go out of control, and you will not achieve agreement to full service catalogue in the time you have allocated - this will make you look bad and disorganized.
You need to be able to argue your case, and where necessary to capitulate and make a change to service definition, as well as identify which executive disagree on fundamental points. Where this happens, you bring two alternatives to the Steering Group, and ask for decision.
You also ask the steering group to assign a rank of importance to each service. You do this by handing out a questionnaire where each service is listed, and they have a "budget" of $100. They must allocate their $100 budget amongst the different services. This will help you all year long but especially at the end of the fiscal year during budgeting.
Then you write SLA's.
I recommend that your SLAs be composed of 5 points:
-Service description (from the service catalogue)
-Availability (how much of the time the users expect to be able to use the service. 24/7? 24/7 with 5 hour maintenance on Sunday? The last 5 business days before month end?
-Remediation time (when the service becomes unavailable, what is an acceptable time to restore it? 1 day? 1 hour?
-Measurement (how will availability be measured? Server uptime? pings from external location? manual login every 4 hours?
-Reporting (how will IT report on all of the above? daily, weekly? include sample reports)
Once this is done, you will have very concrete measurements of you performance.
If you want to go further, investigate ITIL, create a configuration database and a change management process (see ITIL). I also highly recommend the McKinley Airport Simulation exercise from the Microsoft Operating Framework training as an introduction to why ITIL is important, and how it can help.
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