Blogger: Lyn Robison
I remember working as an Enterprise Architect for a large, bureaucratic IT organization in which almost everyone believed that IT’s primary job was to build and run IT systems. The CIO certainly believed that. So did all of the IT directors under him.
The problem I faced was how to get everyone in IT to realize that the IT department’s job is to deliver useful information to the businesspeople who need it. I wanted to get everyone to realize that the systems we implement are only one means to that end and are not an end themselves. I could say that a thousand times, and everyone would agree, or at least feign agreement, and then go back to their work of building and running systems -- systems that provide only a fraction of the useful information that they should. Then I realized that I needed to seize the high ground of IT motivation: metrics.
If you can change the metrics by which an IT department measures its own progress, you can change the IT department and the perceptions of everyone in it. That is why, now as a Burton Group analyst, I wrote an overview entitled “IT Metrics: Measuring IT’s Business Value”. It gives any information-centric IT professional the ammunition they need to change the metrics by which their IT department measures itself. By changing those metrics, you can change the perceptions of what is important in your IT department.
It turned out that the CIO in this large, bureaucratic IT organization knew that metrics were the high ground too, and he blocked my efforts to put information-quality-metrics in place. If I had possessed the ammunition in this overview when I battled that CIO, I could have taken the metrics high ground. Now I am eager to hear how useful this ammunition on information-centric metrics is for you.
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