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How Would You Benchmark an IT/IS Department?
ferretworks asks: "Our IS/IT department has been asked by our CEO to find a way to benchmark ourselves against IS/IT departments from other companies with similar technologies (none specific). This sounds like an innocent enough request, but diving into it has made me realize that this is, not necessarily undiscovered country, but a desolate one and rarely visited. So, my poll to the community is: In your Opinion, what is best way to benchmark an IS/IT department and what categories/sub categories would you base your judgment and ratings on?"
This is actually a HUGE industry.
Forrester, Gartner, and IDG all offer advanced comparison data from industry surveys against which you can measure your own company. (Help desk costs per call, fully-loaded employee per hour, etc.)
Then you implement some sort of metric to use in the comparison. ITIL, COBIT, ISO 17799, and a host of others are available as frameworks you can use, or you can design your own. So you start taking measurements, compile the metrics, and compare.
[How much does a password reset cost? How much does it cost to terminate a sysadmin? How many staff hours are required to clean a virus infection on one machine? On all machines? &c, &c.]
I think you'll be hard-pressed to find a Fortune 1000 company that doesn't use some form of this - it's how most companies compare themselves against the industry.
Hope that helps.
First, all the posters who are saying "It's a trap. If they're delving into this, you're gonna get shafted down the road." are absolutely right. Pay attention to that.
Second, different tasks get measured different ways, so I'm going to concentrate on one aspect, front-line support. That's what I do.
When my upper management got on a kick about assessing skills and measuring performance, my local manager starting doing her best to protect us from the crapola and just let us do our jobs. She's great. Still, I felt the need to pinch-hit for her so at a recent meeting with the big executive who's far enough up the org chart that we almost never actually see her in the flesh, I gave a little speech that went, approximately, like this:
"You want to measure our performance? Fine. For the last several years, you've made a big deal about how we're a support organization and our job is to make sure other folks can do their jobs. So measure that. Assign me a hundred employees (The target user-to-support tech ratio in my organization is currently 113-to-1.) with roughly similar jobs or, for smaller posts of duty, just assign me the entire office. Tell me my job is to keep those people happy. Then randomly and continuously survey those people and ask them if I'm keeping them happy. If I am, I'm doing my job. Nothing else matters. I don't care how many numbers you aggregate off of how many closed trouble tickets and how you compile them and present them in fancy charts and feed them into service delivery models. None of that means anything. All the numbers you're seeing are presented to you by analysts who've never actually been in the field fixing things and dealing with users; you can't trust a thing they say because they don't know what they're talking about. If my customers and my manager think I'm doing a good job, then I'm doing a good job. What I want to know is: Do you have the testicular fortitude to abandon all those meaningless performance metrics and actually start measuring performance by, you know, actual performance? "
Two side comments: My manager is about to give me a perfect performance rating for the year. I know she's going to do that because she had me write the thing. I'm getting it less than a month after that little speech. Also, for you young whippersnappers who think everything in government is bad and anyone who spends more than 6 months on a single job is a loser, I'd like to point out that the speech cited above is a perfect example of why it's great to work under civil service protections and even better to work there long enough that even if management tried to fire you, you could just tell 'me to FO, retire, and take your pension.
I love my job and I do it well; that's why I'm willing to stand up for it. Stand up for yours, if you've got the balls. NOW is the time to start; once management starts measuring the wrong stuff in the wrong ways, you're screwed a dozen ways, none of them involving a happy ending.