Using metrics to justify investment in IT

A firm grasp of metrics and how to implement them can prove vital to the health of your organization-and your career. To gain support from senior management, you must link technical metrics to business metrics-you must show how increases in productivity and quality translate into a better bottom line. So your business and strategy determine the metrics you track. Select measures that are obtainable and that truly matter to your organization's work. You also must be able to collect or derive the metrics data without undue burden. Remember that it's not the measures themselves that matter, but the decisions that will be based upon them. Measures that are expensive or cumbersome to collect will detract from the measurement program's perceived value. Overly intrusive or complex data collection can turn people off and encourage them to invent numbers. The best measures are those that are a natural outcome of people's work, like the number of batch jobs processed in a day or the amount of downtime a system records.