“Traditionally, IT is seen as a cost of doing business with a very limited link from IT activities to business outcomes. In order to prove the link and therefore the value, we need to use performance indicators (often referred to as Key Performance Indicators or KPIs) as measure and proof for both the link and the added value. In this article, IT includes the IT assets and the application and infrastructure management activities to build, maintain and provide IT functions to end users.”

The IT organization is required to be customer-oriented and at the same time flexible and efficient as well as being able to deliver new systems quickly and at low cost. These new systems have to be implemented trouble-free within a stable infrastructure. In fact rather a lot to ask from one single organization. In a relatively immature environment where the customer’s wishes and the available technology are constantly changing, everything is becoming increasingly more complex. For an increasing number of IT organizations, it is just about impossible to keep up with demand. In the Netherlands, the theme for the past ten years was professionalization of the internal IT function. However, customers are still not satisfied because far too much is still going wrong. That for one is why IT is increasingly more often outsourced entirely or partially. Mind you, this usually does not improve the situation but makes it even more uncontrollable. In order to be able to cope with today’s challenges, the IT organization has to reinvent itself!

The internal IT organization that cannot meet the information demands of the business runs the risk of becoming marginalized and losing its right to exist. What can the CIO or IT manager possibly do to win back the confidence of the business and to (re)position his organization as a preferred partner for innovation? Over the past few years, many IT organizations have rationalized their operations, especially with the aim to save on costs in times of economic decline. A side effect of this rationalization is that it becomes increasingly difficult these days to meet the new demands that the business makes on the IT organization with regard to innovation of products and services. Recently, Giarte observed with regard to this that innovation in practice often gets stuck in replacement of written off infrastructure through the adoption of proven technology. And especially now the business views the support of innovation at the business side by capitalizing on new technologies and introduction of new service concepts as one of the main objectives of the IT organization. A workstation migration from Windows XP to the Vista platform is apparently of a different order than exploring and successfully implementing a new distribution channel for online financial services based on Web 2.0 technology. Not just the focus but also the success of innovation projects leaves a lot to be desired: IDC research provides average success rates of only 50%.

This article describes a new approach for (ITIL) process implementations, which has already resulted in measurable and often surprising improvement of IT performance in practice. You can read how from simple data that is available within every IT organization (or that can be made available quite easily), you can explain and pronounce the value of IT to the customer. This takes four steps: We boil down the value of IT to the customer organization into three basic IT services. We translate the basic IT services into six performance indicators. These performance indicators serve as a guideline for an implementation of a new process-oriented way of working. This style of implementation will lead to true improvements of the performance of both IT and IT processes, in a way that benefits the customer of the IT organization. The article also defines the principles and the way of working of performance-based implementation and illustrates this with two real-life examples.

Implementing standards delivering business value Legislative compliance and the continuous rat race for higher quality and lower cost are some of the topics that keep the average IT manager from having a nine-to-five working day. And this despite the availability of a multitude of models, approaches and best practices claiming to be the golden egg your IT organization has been looking for all this time. And now there is the well-known ISO-goose claiming they have laid another egg: ISO/IEC20000. Many people fear this to be another bureaucratic nightmare that will deliver no value. And of course, just like with ISO9000, there is a risk that not the concept of driving for quality is embraced but just a paper reflection of it, leading to an organization that thinks only about ISO when its time for the next audit. But when applied properly it can indeed add substantial value for businesses, especially in information intensive industries. This white paper describes not only how to implement ISO/IEC20000 in your organization in a way that it actually adds measurable financial value, but more over what it is about and how it relates to some of those other popular models floating around in the market space.