TABLE OF CONTENTS [Feeling patient s pulse] Either he s dead, or my watch has stopped.
Groucho Marx in A Day at the Races
If you are going to take the pulse of your IT function then you had better be confident that the tools you use are credible and up to the job. It could just be that the tools are sicker than the patient. Their prognosis of the imminent death of your IT function may be premature! So this chapter is focused on building credible tools for measuring an organization s degree of success at transforming the business value of IT. But before that I want to briefly explore why we should bother to measure at all.
Gartner report that about $1.5bn is spent annually on IT performance measurement. They add that this is apparently only about 2 per cent of total IT expenditure (presumably in order to imply that $1.5bn is not serious money or perhaps to imply that far more should be spent, provided it is spent with, say, GartnerMeasurement). But I think that most of us would regard this sum as still being rather more than loose change and we would like to believe that this money was being spent to good effect, in terms of giving the business an accurate and objective understanding of the performance of its IT function and the value it extracts from its IT investment. Despite all this money being spent on measurement, the Meta group report, The Business of IT...
