You may be facing a dilemma common to many CIOs and senior IT executives: Where can you get the information you need to develop an effective IT strategy, improve cost efficiency and demonstrate IT’s value to the business?

In too many organizations, efforts to gather and prepare IT performance metrics fail to provide the necessary insight. The process takes too long and the reports often focus on IT system performance, rather than the quality of an IT process and how to minimize cost and inefficiency. As a result, the metrics you receive are marginally valuable and your challenge of demonstrating IT value persists.

The problem usually begins with IT’s inability to provide the metrics CIOs require. Information resides in silos distributed across systems and IT functions, making the information hard to collect. Metrics are often defined and used inconsistently. This results in a process that’s focused on gathering, reconciling and reporting metrics, rather than analyzing them. By the time a report ends up on your desk, the metrics are too old and only provide a snapshot in time, with no correlation to previous performance.

CIOs need more timely metrics. You need tools to predict “what if” scenarios, such as the impact on revenue if a particular server or IT process is brought down. You need a broader variety of metrics: costs by service or resources, resources by portfolio, budget or future demand.

These types of metrics allow you to answer important questions for the business, such as, how is the investment in IT innovation allocated by line of business? How have those investments trended over time? What is the variance between projected and actual ROI for each IT service category over time?

To do this, you need an analytics solution that can quickly and automatically pull data from across IT functions and systems, and which can synthesize and present the metrics with meaningful context. This gives you a business-centric view of IT performance, and allows you to measure and improve the entire IT organization—from assets to labor to processes.

With the right performance metrics you can measure and quantify what’s important to the business, rather than IT. You can focus on what the business needs and values rather than operational metrics that don’t reveal much about business performance. BI for the CIO helps you:

• Measure and continually improve the cost efficiency for all of IT.
• Understand IT changes in business terms, such as lost revenue if a service is disabled.
• Better align IT resources with business problems.
• Continually improve IT processes.

Like any significant change involving people, process and technology, implementing BI for the CIO requires planning. You have to bridge the gap between the needs of IT management, your current technical capabilities and where you want to go. Executing your strategic plan should include the following key phases:

1. Needs assessment: Identify and prioritize senior IT management’s critical information needs. Do this through interviews and group discussion focused on operational best-practices with each IT function.
2. Current capability and readiness assessment: Analyze your current operational and analytic systems to determine the availability, level of granularity and accuracy of data you’re capturing across all IT functions.
3. Gap analysis and recommendations: Map identified needs to current capabilities; this will tell you which of your needs can be met immediately and which require improvements to data availability and quality before proceeding.
4. Phased implementation plan: Develop your implementation roadmap based on priority of needs and any dependencies with improving data quality and availability. Be practical with your plan and break out costs and deliverables by iteration. Clearly identify where immediate improvements can be made.

HP’s BI for the CIO solution combines its DecisionCenter data warehouse software with specialized business intelligence consulting services and training to help you plan and implement a complete analytics solution. In combination with its market-leading IT management software, such as HP Service Manager, HP Asset Manager and HP Performance Center, HP helps you more easily customize systems and quickly extract and organize the performance analytics you need.

The breadth of HP’s BI for the CIO solution, combined with its specialization in IT management software, can help accelerate and ease your IT analytics planning and implementation process. Additionally, HP has deep expertise integrating its own IT management software, as well as that of third-party vendors. Learn more about HP’s BI for the CIO solution.

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