A simple management tenet from the late great Peter Drucker is (slightly paraphrased) "if it isn't measured, it cant be managed", yet in IT, measurement and benchmarking seem to be a long way from the conversation that is being had at most organizations.
How much time are you taking to measure the effects of your strategy?
Who are you benchmarking against and on what metrics? Are they internal IT or business relevant metrics?
According to George Westerman and Richard Hunter in their great book "The Real Business of IT", the companies who value their IT division as a strategic partner have one principal thing in common - the performance of IT is benchmarked regularly and communicated to the rest of the organization in terms relevant to them.
I'm about 50% of the way through their book and I've arrived at the conclusion that I need to modify my framework for IT projects, I've come up with the following as a framework to make sure that I always deliver value and to allow me to begin screening out those projects that either have a low probability of success or are going to be seen as the typical IT black hole that doesn't deliver value.
1 - Benchmark the current performance using relevant metrics.
2 - Understand the metrics that you are trying to influence.
3 - Formulate a technology strategy that will influence those metrics.
4 - Execute.
5 - Benchmark and compare your outcome with your target outcome.
Tell me what you think - I'll be testing it out over the coming months and will do a follow up post once I understand where the gaps are.
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