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The Four Fallacies of IT Metrics
snydeq writes "Advice Line's Bob Lewis discusses an all-too-familiar IT mistake: the use of incidents resolved per analyst per week as a metric for assessing help-desk performance. 'If you managed the help desk in question or worked on it as an analyst, would you resist the temptation to ask every friend you had in the business to call in on a regular basis with easy-to-fix problems? Maybe you would. I'm guessing that if you resisted the temptation, not only would you be the exception, but you'd be the exception most likely to be included in the next round of layoffs,' Lewis writes. 'The fact of the matter is it's a lot easier to get metrics wrong than right, and the damage done from getting them wrong usually exceeds the potential benefit from getting them right.' In other words, when it comes to IT metrics, you get what you measure — that's the risk you take."
This problem was aptly portrayed in the classic dilbert comic strip in 1995.
I'm going to code myself a minivan.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Of course it wasn't. If it had been a hedge fund in 2006, they'd have all still gotten bonuses.
I used to have two standard replys to the, "It's broken" type of complaint.
- "How can you tell? Is there an axe sticking out of it?"
and
- "How can you tell? Is it on fire?"
One day I had this young kid came up to me saying, "My computer is broken." so of course I respond, "How can you tell? Is it on fire?"
He looked a bit embarrassed and said, "Well it was smoking and made a buzzing sound but it has stopped now."
His one day old computer's power supply had burned up in a spectacular fashion.
(Still waiting to see an axe...)