KPIs for CIOs
KPIs for CIOs
For most chief information officers, your role within an organization encompasses no less than executive responsibilities — making sure your departments are contributing to the profitability of the company; innovation, operational excellence, change management, and perhaps many more depending on your company’s specific needs, and of course, there’s an expectation that you deliver on all fronts. Given your responsibilities and their associated demands, it’s imperative to have KPIs in place to help ensure that you’re providing the information technology functions within your organization with the leadership needed to be successful. If setting KPIs has been a challenge for you, consider these five commonly used, general performance measures for IT departments and use them as a guideline to establish and build out your own comprehensive structure:
Commonly Used IT Department KPIs:
- Optimized infrastructure and applications
- Efficient staffing
- Timely response times
- Successful system implementation
- Value and cost management
Optimized infrastructure and applications
An IT department’s first priority should be to ensure that the organization it supports has a solid infrastructure in place to handle existing application and processing capabilities. Using performance and cost information, the CIO can then assess where there are opportunities for process and cost improvements. This can be achieved in part by evaluating areas like hardware and software problems that are impacting more than one user, incident reports and resolution, scope of problems, response times and trends.
Efficient staffing
It’s also important to make sure that available staff resources are being utilized efficiently. This is done by analyzing turnover rates by position, reviewing open positions that are negatively impacting projects and support, as well as considering any overstaffing and use of contractors.
Timely response times
Another IT department KPI, is how quickly you can respond to and resolve issues. Backlogs can be measured by type, size, hours, etc. You’ll also want to graph completed requests in reporting periods, late responses, on-time performance, budget overages for projects — these measures will be impacted by the size of the project.
Successful system implementation and change management
The successful implementation of infrastructure changes or new applications is another important KPI for IT departments. This can be measured in time, costs and success rate. It can also be broken out by planned application changes, emergency application changes and enhancement changes. You’ll also want to consider issues that arise from changes, work hours associated with changes, as well as any downtime.
Value and cost management
CIOs must also be vigilant in managing the cost of delivering IT services to make sure that maximum value and customer satisfaction are achieved by the available resources. Most IT departments have limited funds and fixed budgets, and are expected to provide solutions and meet conflicting demands. The IT department must be able to work across the organization to ensure that resources are efficiently and effectively being deployed to support the initiatives that deliver the most value.
If you need help building a strong, IT department contact Infovision’s Strategic Resources team. We can be deployed either on-site at a client at any location worldwide, at one of our several on-shore facilities in USA, or at our off-shore facility in Bangalore, India or any combination thereof.