In the past, most IT organizations focused their service measurements on the underlying technology that was in the data center. Those are the servers, network devices, and applications that support the delivery of services. When a device went down, and an application failed or performance degraded, IT worried about getting that device back up and running, so they could move on to the next technical issue.
Although that is an important aspect of IT service measurement, it is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not enough to know that a hardware component failed, or that the performance of a database is degraded. What’s critical is how those issues affect the services delivered, the customers of that service, the bottom line, and how likely IT is to achieve their objectives.
IT departments have come a long way in the past decade and the industry has begun to understand that the impact a technical issue causes to the organization should be the main service driver. IT workers also realize that the impact can be hard (financial) or soft (the loss of reputation or customer dissatisfaction). Now oftentimes, IT service management has a customer-centric strategy around issues.
In fact, many of the IT service management monitoring tools now have consoles that display how a particular device is impacting the delivery of services. This is a huge paradigm change, and as a result, a greater focus has been placed on ensuring proactive holistic service measurement.
Service measurement’s objective is to collect metrics, which verify in every aspect, that IT is efficiently and effectively supporting the business and helping it meet its goals and objectives. At the same time, IT is using measurements and metrics to ensure they are doing the right things to achieve their own departmental goals and objectives.
Finally, and just as importantly, these measurements must provide insight into risks, issues and areas that need improvement.
This is an excerpt taken from my white paper, “How to Measure your IT Department for Better Service Delivery”. Use this white paper to learn about why we should measure IT service, the basis for what is measured, the areas that need to be measured, and the types of measurements that should be captured.