How to measure the impact of IT operations on your business (Part 1) - Blog - dev2ops - Solving Large Scale Web Operations and DevOps Problems

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How to measure the impact of IT operations on your business (Part 1)

Walk into any web-based business and more likely than not you'll find all sorts of metrics that have been collected with varying levels of accuracy, consistency, and freshness. However, despite what appears to be a wealth of data, no one will seem to be all that happy with it.

The frontline guys are grumbling about having to deal with the collection and reporting overhead while questioning under their breathe "what's in it for me?". The technology managers are still making decisions based on anecdotal evidence, gut feelings, or knee-jerk reactions to the latest incidents. And to top it all off, the business managers are clamoring for new dashboards because the last ones didn't tell them much that was actually useful for managing the business.

In short, there is endless data floating around, but no one appears to have the knowledge they want.

Invariably another "metrics project" is going to come down the project pipeline. But why would this effort turn out any different than the previous efforts?

Here are six straightforward steps for putting into place a metrics program that actually delivers knowledge about your operations and your business:

Step #0: Stop looking for metrics and start thinking about KPIs

Most metrics projects that are initiated within a technology organization will take a bottom up view of the world. The thought process is often to grab as much data as possible and then try later to make some sense of it with a bit of analytical magic. The dream is that, with enough technical mojo, you'll arrive at a magical "ah ha!" moment where a piece of important knowledge jumps out.

Unfortunately, for as common as this dream is, it rarely comes true. After considerable effort, ...

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http://dev2ops.org/blog/2009/11/20/how-to-measure-the-impact-of-it-operations-on-your-business.html

http://dev2ops.org/blog/2009/11/20/how-to-measure-the-impact-of-it-operations-on-your-business.html