IT Service Delivery: The Challenge of Meaningful Metrics

Focusing on reliability of IT service delivery involves constant monitoring of service activity across various organizational levels. To align IT and business for sustainable client-provider relationship businesses have to maintain clear business goals as well as have objective knowledge about day-to-day processes, occurring within their infrastructure.

In this short article Hypersoft Information Systems summarizes two principal approaches to service metrics, top-down and bottom-up, and examines which approach of metrics collection should be adopted by service providers for down-to-earth service level management.

First of all, let’s have a look at the specifics of using metrics for business needs. One of the challenges of quality service delivery is the fact that IT processes within the enterprise should be expressed and presented to the decision-makers in clear and meaningful manner, understandable to the business user. Another important point is the need for having adequate compliance with the legislation and industry best-practices in use. Furthermore, businesses must not be mislead by everyday operational activities and must maintain clear business focus on strategic service delivery.

Top-Down Approach

Top-down approach of metrics collection is characterized by first-of-all deciding upon strategic goals and monitoring those services that are most related to value creation. The overall process is subdivided into smaller yet by no means less important tasks to be resolved, such as how to find out service performance, what KPIs are reasonable to be used for solid understanding of a business user, whether all of them can be measured and how we actually measure them. One of the important priority issues is how the service correlates with the existing infrastructure.

Bottom-Up Approach

The methodology of bottom-up approach is rather different – instead of initial creation of service contract portfolio, company starts with monitoring of all current IT business activities and then aligns raw metrics to corporate strategy. The intermediate steps that are required for an effective implementation include such tasks as transforming and aggregating data into meaningful statistics to try to identify high level metrics. When these activities are accomplished, business then tries to identify important metrics and its KPIs.

So how do we get to the true business metrics? Let’s briefly compare the approaches described.

With top-down metrics collection:

• KPIs are understood by provider and client, both internal and external
• Clear assignment of service delivery metrics to business values
• Standardized service portfolio
• True end-to-end monitoring

The bottom-up approach:

• Technically driven
• Focused on resources allocation and optimization
• Requires technical competence from business users
• Adapts service definitions to execution capabilities

Judging upon what was mentioned previously, it can be argued that business process transaction integration is the key to business metrics. Starting with a transaction definition at the business level and detailing the transaction to its elements on multiple systems and platforms leads to a consolidation of both high accuracy and high scalability of business measurements. One of the main aspects for having useful metrics is keeping them technology agnostic, and therefore an initial service definition understandable to the business user is one of the key requirements. Doing so prior to looking at the delivering applications presents a clear picture of client-provider interaction from start to finish and so allows focusing on the long-term strategy. Moreover, implementing proactive measures as opposed to reactive ones lowers the chance of incidents, occurring in the future, and this can only be done with careful analysis of reasons of failures rather than by monitoring and reacting to performance alerts.