Links that I have found interesting for August 11th:

• blue pencil | How do you understand your KPI’s? – An example scenario: You are the maintenance manager for the xyz widget factory and have a plant availability target of 95% and an actual availability of 92% so desire an increase of 3%. You also know you spend 50% of your trade people’s effort on Preventative Maintenance and have 6% of downtime due to breakdowns. How do you determine what needs to be done to meet your availability target?

  This is where you need a mental model of the business system or process that is being measured for KPI’s. The model provides a means to understand how the different KPI’s interact and what pulling one lever will do to the remainder of the system.

• KPI's for ICT (Part 2) – example KPI's for the CIO can be derived:

  Executive:

  * Actual ICT spending vs Plan budget (budget awareness management)
  * % of ICT cost in relation to Actual Revenue (agile business awareness)

  Innovation:

  * % of current business initiatives driven by ICT (pro-activeness of role is measured)
  * % ICT Capital Spending of Total Investment (relative to peer group or market)

  Change:

  * ROI on ICT Capital Spending (measure the actual result on revenue and profit of ICT investments)
  * % Average time-to-profitability for changes to existing products/services
  * % of ICT resources associated to ICT non-maintenance tasks (drive continuous change)

  Operational:

  * % of cost price decrease for a business transaction (e.g. Order-to-cash)
  * % of ICT costs associated to ICT maintenance (should structurally lower over time)
  * % of improvement in customer satisfaction (only if measured as standard integrated part of the operation)

• KPI's for IT (Part 1) – I'm not advocating abandoning KPI's at all, but would make them simpler and connected. My preference is for KPI's based upon the Key Business Requirements (KBR's): Revenue, profit, customer addition and retention, and market share. The argument that individuals lower in the hierarchy cannot contribute are in my opinion not correct: When the management says "growth" it might happen; When the work floor feels growth, it will happen.
  The 1:1 alignment of the KPI's with the KBR's is essential and can be drilled down in scope (e.g., department or customer group) and impact (percentage of on target earnings) for an individual. Try to bring the current KBR's and KPI's of your organization into a work-breakdown structure, and see how they match (or not).
• erp4it: ITSM and SOA – a strong case that the best concept of "IT Service" is larger grained than the "Application" concept. His definition is interesting:

  * A service always refers to a capability and not a specific technology
  * A service does not make reference to an organizational function, department or structure.
  * A service is supported by one or many systems.

• What is considered good application performance? – Like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, optimal application performance is in the experience of the end user. It's a subjective matter that can bewilder network managers trying to ensure every app performs as its end users expect. And while the process of determining what optimal application performance is can be ambiguous, it is crystal clear when the goal has not been met and end users are complaining about slow service and non-responsive applications.