A colleague recently challenged me on whether we really are an IT Performance Management business. This got me thinking…
In a business context, IT performance management is all about measuring the cost of technology and working out the extent to which that investment improves strategic and operational capabilities of the firm. Are people able to work more productively and happily?
“They take it for granted it will all just work!”
When you take it to an operations level, IT Performance Management is a set of tools and processes which monitor and analyse performance metrics. Is the system available, is it behaving in an abnormal way? These metrics may look at the network, server performance, data storage, security posture etc. Who cares?
“The only number they want to see is spend and what projects need funding.”
In enterprise scale organisations the CIO will have teams of people responsible for IT Portfolio Management. In the types of firm we’re typically working with, this sits with one of the partners, the COO or even the CEO. And generally speaking, COOs have got other things to think about.
My ‘ah ha’ moment came when I realised that most of our best customers people don’t really want to know much about their IT.
- They want to know whether what they’ve got today is cost effective, scalable and compliant
- They want to know what they’re going to need tomorrow to meet their business objectives
- And they need to keep the millennials happy and stay ahead of their competitors
A cost per user per month fee, a monthly performance report, a quarterly strategic planning session, and someone at the end of the phone who knows their business, keeps our happiest customers very happy.
What gets measured, gets managed.
We firmly believe the old adage that what gets measured gets managed, so we’ve created a framework for measuring IT performance and investment. The Bedroq Maturity Index evaluates the IT environment and creates a score and a dashboard of real time management information including things like cost per user, system availability and performance, security posture and user experience.
And yes, we do provide hosting, network management, desktop to data centre services and security. But when people ask me what we do, it’s simple. We help CEOs manage the performance of IT in their business. We work out where they are today, what they are going to need in the future and make sure that technology is performing as required, with a demonstrable return on investment.
I’m at peace with that.
If you’d like to discuss the performance of IT in your business, get in touch with me, Mark Flynn. [email protected], 07948611697