What data should I be collecting about my IT service to make better decisions?

What’s one of the most common reasons why organisations tend to engage with IT consultants? 

In our experience, it ultimately comes down to data gathering and organisation to ensure that they have the right information to form viewpoints and ultimately make strategic decisions.  

Internally there often just isn’t the time, resources or sometimes the skillset to sieve through the mountain of data to pin point specific challenges or identify the gaps in information that is blocking a decision from being made. This is usually the point where an organisation will bring in an external consultant to get to the heart of the problem and form the evidence on which to enable a decision on change to be made. 

But, if you were looking to keep these initial stages of your digital transformation in house, what data should you be collecting about your IT service to make better decisions? 

The discovery phase of a change project should begin with the following data sets... 

Existing technology 

Knowing what technology you have and what technology is being used by which group of users, services or departments is a great starting point. If this is modelled correctly against the structure of the organisation, there is a wealth of insights you can glean from this. Applications can be a critical convergence point in understanding both risks from dependencies and consumer satisfaction within the organisation. And there are other insights this can help with. It can help in:  

1. Understanding what sorts of processes are being used, what data that service or function is capturing and how it’s being captured from the type of application being used.  
2. Understanding what infrastructure the specific business service or function is dependent on and how any risks and issues in this area could affect the organisation’s capability

From this analysis, you may also then start to understand overlaps in technology use, the ways of working across the organisation and what sorts of data are currently present across the digital environment. All of this together creates a holistic understanding of risks across the full stack of technologies used by an IT consumer. 

Consumer Feedback  

What do your consumers think of the IT services that you provide? Do they feel like they get the experience they need from the IT services they consume? This is critical to understand because, we believe, all change needs to be driven from a point of view of the end user. This is to ensure that, at the very least, the service they receive is as good as it was before digital change was embarked upon and it provides the opportunity to think strategically about improving customer experience at the point of digital change.  

By understanding which departments are feeding back which scores, you can also get a feel for who and where to focus change first to make the most impact from the change you are planning to make. A change to IT service has the potential to detract from the quality of the experience for your end users. Therefore, understanding what technology your consumers use and what they think of your IT services is key to success. 

IT Operations  

We strongly believe that change should not replicate or propagate the challenges faced by IT and any digital change should not add to the challenges that IT already face. This means that it is critical to understand the following 4 key areas before proposing a change solution;  

1. The IT operating model and capability of IT to operate against the services promised and the services planned as part of digital transformation. 
2. How the IT services provided are delivering against organisational outcomes and objectives. 
3. The resources required to fulfil the service expectations. This includes understanding what how each IT function is contributing to the success of the services provided.  
4. How third parties are currently contributing to the existing operating model, the contract timelines, expectations, quality of delivery and the value that is being received from those investments.  

Understanding these factors in a joined-up manner often leads to insight into how the current operating model fits with the expectations of the organisation and complexity of the service, particularly when bringing together with other topics covered in this post, such as consumer feedback and complexity generated by the existing technology landscape. 

Resource Analysis 

Having a strong understanding of where expenditure on IT has recently been placed and how this can be strategically adjusted to fit into future budgets is often key for execs to understand. Therefore, we suggest calculating the costs of the service in detail by using a data taxonomy to: 

• Baseline the expenditure used in providing functions and services and the outcomes they are achieving for the organisation i.e. managing a desktop, providing a service desk etc. 
• Align the outcomes (such as desktops managed, tickets managed etc) to the consumers of those services or outcomes provided by IT. 

By doing this there can be some fantastic insights that come out in terms of the cost of particular services, cost per asset, cost per application cost per ticket etc, providing a total cost of ownership across the whole of IT in a very detailed way. Enabling IT to compare solutions in the market and model how digital change could impact on the cost of the service moving forward. 

As you can see, digital transformation projects can require a mountain of data in order to build an effective business case for change. Manually retrieving and collating this data can be a massive drain on time and resources, but what if this process could be automated? What if you could invest your budget in strategy rather than discovery?  

CoPerceptuo provides the capability to more easily achieve this data gathering and provides the analytics out of the box to start to understand how these metrics could enable your next transformation. Check it out here…