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June 1-15, 2000 MANAGING IT |
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Measure Your Service Why do the efforts and services of the IS department generally go unnoticed and why is it unable to show its value to the business? The department needs to continuously monitor and review its process measurement activities for realignment with the organisation's business. By Vikas Arora It is a common occurrence to see information systems (IS) departments trying to explain delays in service to internal customers. However, it is uncommon to find internal customers actually understanding the value of IS departments in their organisation, while continuing to use their services. So, how much is an IT helpdesk worthy in an organisation? To understand a small but critical aspect of IS department's service to its internal customers, consider an organisation with an annual turnover of Rs 50 crore and employee strength of 200. Thus, the average contribution per employee annually is Rs 25,00,000. If the firm is open 250 days in a year and average working hours per day are eight, then average contribution per hour per employee would be Rs 1,250. Now, if the user-productivity is dependent on the uptime of desktop computer to the extent of 80 per cent, then the IS department saves approximately Rs 1,000 per hour per user. So why do the efforts and services of the IS department go unnoticed? An old mantra of management says, "You cannot manage what you do not measure". This is indeed one of the main factors responsible for IS departments' inability to show value to business. The Behind-the-scene Bravado IS departments need to realise that if they do not measure their services, someone else (that is, their customers) would do and may not project a correct picture of them (the IS department) based on their perceptions and incomplete information. This would adversely affect the department's reputation within the organisation, and value addition that they make to business, as perceived by others. In worst cases, it may lead to loss of job for the person responsible for IT despite the fact that the person may be doing a great job. However, this is not the only reason to measure service to your customers. In fact, one of the most important reasons to measure service is for improvement of the current process of delivering service. And one cannot improve on a process until one has some facts or measurement of current or past processes and activities. This approach should also be able to provide you with early warning indicators for an activity/project enabling you to take corrective actions. The approach provides a common language to decision makers, stake-holders and customers about quality, quantity, cost and timeliness of products and services. The Goal in Front Don't measure what does not lead to a process improvement or, in other words, does not enable you to make a decision. This could also be interpreted as saying that one needs to derive the measurable parameters or metrics from one's organisation's business plan and targets. In fact, if an activity or a process does not help in achieving the business targets, it may not be wise to have it in the first case. Always think of a goal or target before you introduce a measure. Never use performance or service measurement approach for assigning blame or to comply with reporting requirements. Use this approach to improve processes and performances. Use IT to learn from mistakes. In one of the software development houses an auditor asked one of the top business unit management executives as to how he, as the head of the division, takes feedback or measures the quality of software that the company delivers. The department head very proudly took out a set of feedback forms followed by some numericals that gave the number of defects in the software delivered. The auditor was not satisfied and asked him how he measured or took feedback from the "paying" customers, to which he had no clue. The head of the division apparently was satisfied in what feedback he got from his next-level customer who was an internal employee or a different geographical location of the same firm and never tried to understand the larger perspective of the business. The message here is: "always start with thinking of the end first". That means, start your measurement programme by first taking company targets and, hence, the interests of the customer who ultimately pays for the product or services of your organisation. Try to see how the end customer would be interested in your process and what would he like to improve in these processes. Those are your first measures. In order to make sure that you have best practices implemented within an organisation, ensure that you do regular survey of your processes and practices with best-of-class and similar organisations. Measuring Efficiency Recently I visited one of the multinational banks to have a cheque transferred to my account and had to wait for 20 minutes to get the acknowledgement slip from the bank executive. The main server of the bank was down and, hence, all activities were at standstill. As an end-customer what I would like to see is that the bank has a backup server in place so that I do not have to spend 20 minutes for a two-minute job. If the IS department of the bank I visited is smart enough, it would measure the downtime of the server and equate it to the revenue loss to the bank, the price of non-conformity (for example, what if I as a customer wanted to deposit a huge amount of money). Further, compare and analyse it against the expense involved in getting a standby server, which can help give the end customer an uninterrupted service and information. If one can measure the efficiency in IS departments, one can possibly track and improve their services and performance, besides transforming the gains into business and financial performances of an organisation. Let's take an example of a helpdesk in an organisation for internal service or service providers who give service to external customers. What could be critical for them to measure are cost, speed and quality of the service. So the measurable parameters that are a must could be: time to respond to a customer call, time to resolve a customer call and the number of customer calls received during a fixed period (for example, a fortnight or a month). An overall analysis of these points could give you an insight into the present state of service as well as help you take constructive steps to improve service to your end customers. Quality of Service Some other parameters to track the quality of services could be:
The list above does not cover measures which are necessary to track other services provided by IS departments like application services, network services, Internet services, mobile computing, new installations, change management, virus prevention, Web management and security, among a variety of other services. Another measure an IS department may undertake to get an idea about the quality of its services is to review the data collected from customers on the calls received and closed at the end of, say every week. It may also send questionnaires to customers and ask them if they were satisfied with the quality of the service or solution provided to them. The customers could be encouraged to send comments and suggestions to improve the service or application. This has greatly helped some IS departments in terms of their customer relationships and initiated improvement in their processes based on the constructive feedback received, thus finally benefiting the customers. The IS department may also show the data and comments from customers to the top management and get budget sanctions to improve infrastructure, introduce new applications for improved service, which, in turn, could benefit the business. An organisation, as part of its helpdesk system, could encourage end-users to log requests via a Web-based application that would give a tag to the request logged and give an online status of the request till the request is closed. Once the call is closed, the user who logged the call can be asked to give his views by clicking on a "thumb up" or "thumb down" icon for the service provided by the department. It would also be wise to have an agreement with your customers regarding the service that you provide. This helps to set expectations on both sides so that there is no ambiguity. Take some time and list down the services you provide to your customers and get a service level agreement signed with the customer. It would also help to agree on measurements based on business targets, while making a service-level agreement for each service. The Learning Paradigm Developing IT performance measures, which can show impact of IT on business goals, require the management's commitment and a continuous learning environment. Most important is to make an IT strategy/plan derived from business goals which would give IT mission/vision as well as goals, thus providing objectives for IS departments. One such new tool to measure and monitor is "Balanced Scorecard", which was co-authored by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in early 1990s. This tool allows an organisation's strategic business plan into measurable and traceable activities and actions. It is becoming widely accepted these days due to the fact that it focuses on all aspects in an organisation that can affect the financial performance-customers, internal processes, learning and growth. There are other methodologies like value management framework, critical success factor analysis and SWOT analysis which could also be used for performance measurement. However, no system is perfect. As business targets of your company keep changing, you'll need to continuously monitor and review your process measurement activities for realignment with business as well as improvement opportunities. Vikas Arora is Associate Director, Cambridge Technology Partners. E-mail: varora@ctp.com |
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