Industry leaders Michael Pott and Richard Hawes will be presenting a webinar at our partner BrightTALK’s IT Monitoring and Metrics summit on July 16-17. We met with the two speakers from HP to get some exclusive information about their session and to pick their brains and find out just why they believe metrics are important in any tech professional’s business strategy.
To see the full summit line-up, click here: https://www.brighttalk.com/r/nrH
1) Please give us a short summary of your webinar and what viewers can expect to learn from it:
IT managers have been seeing productivity gains as a result of implementing Service Management toolsets but find it more difficult to convey the value they are providing to the rest of the business. Service Management reporting typically focuses on IT terms and measures and aligning that with business objectives is left to manual reporting processes. In this webinar we’ll talk about business-aligned measurement of service management. We’ll look at how you can use information already captured in ITSM systems such as the help desk, but also in asset management, monitoring, application quality management and other tools.
2) What do you believe are the main problems IT professionals have when it comes to choosing the right metrics to consider?
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Michael Pott 
Richard Hawes Metrics provided by default from the ITSM systems tend to be IT-focused not business focused
- There are many frameworks and standards (ITIL, COBIT etc.) that provide guidelines but few that provide practical metric implementation advice.
- Implementing metric measurement and management has in the past been a very manual process – especially in rolling up the data to a business perspective
3) How can ITSM practitioners utilise metrics to benefit the end-user?
ITSM practitioners need to consider how metrics benefit the end user in terms of users of their services but also those involved in managing services like service owners, and those that are providing investment funding such as line of business managers. So the benefits metrics can provide to all of these are:
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End-user Perspective:
o End-users can be provided reports and insights into KPIs of direct interest to them with unique insights such as performance related to price of delivery
o End-users may want to see information regarding their utilization of services in a way that can help them to determine if they can change behaviors to improve service levels, reduce costs to them etc.
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IT Manager and Service Owner Perspective:
o There are many people who can benefit from service performance metrics but are either not users of the ITSM tools or who access to the tools but only see some of the data. For example, a service owner may see information about their service from their local helpdesk but not from other helpdesks around the world. An analytics tool can pull data from multiple instances of ITSM tools to provide the bigger picture and present it in a dashboard to people who aren’t logged in to the ITSM tools.
o As metrics can come from other sources besides ITSM a service owner can get other perspectives such as quality information from development projects, availability information from monitoring tools etc.
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Line of Business / Business Relationship Managers
o IT is typically serving end users on behalf of a business unit that is directly or indirectly funding the operation. The business wants to see performance information related to their objectives and priorities – something that is simpler when metrics roll up into KPIs and KPIs are used to score objectives.
4) Do you think that ITSM KPIs have changed now in the “age of the customer?”
- Absolutely! Metrics and KPIs used to be very IT-focused – MTTR, incident aging etc. Being truly customer-focused means more than just performing IT processes well. Now we must understand the impact of those processes on business outcomes and demonstrate to the customer that we are providing real value.
5) What are the main difficulties that IT professionals face when communicating business value?
- Getting the right information. Performance and financial data is spread all across the IT environment and pulling it together has been a manual, slow, expensive process. The best most teams could provide was an end-of-the-month report. Even then people did not trust the reports as they were often uncertain as to the integrity of the data. People want a common agreed-upon system of record.
- Putting that information into business terms. It’s not good talking in terms of ‘percentage of reopened incidents’ by itself – you need to link it to other metrics and KPIs to understand how it impacts a broader business objective such as ‘Customer satisfaction’. We believe a powerful way to do this is in a balanced scorecard where metrics build KPIs, and KPIs are combined against objectives. And HP can use their experience in this space to provide a lot of best practice KPIs and Objective OOTB.
6) Which metrics to you believe often get overlooked the most?
- First some metrics are not included because they are difficult to obtain or they take additional work to achieve – such as those that require tracking historical data or metrics that rely on more than one source.
- However the biggest problem is that, to have a broader value discussion, you need metrics and KPIs that are more business aligned or that can be combined to understand the business impact. That means not just looking at individual metrics but instead looking at broader objectives. So an Objective like “Improve Quality of Delivery” may have metrics from the help desk, a development quality system and more.
Register for Michael and Richard’s webinar called ‘How to Demonstrate Value Through ITSM KPIs’ here: https://www.brighttalk.com/r/rrH
About BrightTALK
BrightTALK provides webinars and videos for professionals and their communities. Every day thousands of thought leaders are actively sharing their insights, their ideas and their most up-to-date knowledge with professionals all over the globe through the technologies that BrightTALK has created.
About Hewlett-Packard
At HP, we don’t just believe in the power of technology, we believe in the power of people when technology works for you. We believe in applying new thinking and ideas to improve the way our customers live and work. If you are going to do something, Make it Matter.
Photo credit: Oleksandr Pylypenko
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