Companies are refreshing metrics across application security, content management, customer relationship management, DevOps, loyalty, networking, vulnerability risk management, etc. But what does this look like for infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams? Many metrics that IT uses date back at least 20 years. Common metrics include mean time to repair (MTTR), customer satisfaction, tickets by status, etc. Unfortunately, these common metrics don’t serve modern technology operations:

  • Old metrics fail to reward automation. Measures such as MTTR are antiquated in environments where systems have been built to be highly resilient and automatically scalable. If I&O is doing its job correctly, the low-complexity, high-volume incidents are being rooted out of the system. This, in turn, leads to rising MTTR, given that only the very complex incidents remain counted.
  • Customer satisfaction lacks quality and quantity. Employees fear honesty and want to avoid getting colleagues in trouble, which is why help-desk ratings are consistently high, even though general enterprise sentiment is highly critical. Other classic issues with surveys are that wording can vary in clarity and that, with busy schedules, customers only respond to dramatic experiences.
  • Tickets by status lacks customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) focus. Operations metrics that focus on closing tickets fail to capture the experience before, during, and after. They also fail to capture the level of effort it took to resolve the issue or productivity lost while the issue was being resolved.

So what are the modern metrics and measures I&O should be held accountable to but also use as a barometer to help the non-IT stakeholders understand performance from a business-outcomes standpoint? I am tackling this question in a new research stream. Early findings include:

  • Minutes of lost productivity. Forrester’s EX research shows that employees care most about productivity. This metric measures delays in productivity across application users and development organizations when they are waiting for a response or are experiencing an outage. This can be quantified with a dollar amount.
  • Code deployment efficiency. As enterprises shift to a more DevOps-like deployment stance, the early data suggests that the number of incidents is rising. We must measure the impact of changes in terms of issues and assign risk scores to future changes.
  • CX and EX journey mapping. Uncover the most painful aspects of operations by journey mapping experiences across diverse customer and employee experiences.

Want To Learn More Or Participate In The Research? Contact Us

If you’re interested in gaining more insights metrics, Forrester clients can always submit an inquiry request to inquiry@forrester.com. I am also currently looking to interview organizations that have dedicated significant thought to metrics, so if you’d like to tell me your story or how you’re measuring success, send me an email at rlane@forrester.com.