The Metrics Portal is a forum dedicated to helping technology managers improve their organizations' performance through better use of metrics. There are several sections to this site:
Metrics Frameworks: to structure your metrics planning, from sourcing of the raw data, to delivery of metrics to the organization
Library of IT Metrics: collection of sample metrics reports to support your IT improvement and balanced scorecard efforts (updated regularly with new metrics)
Discussion Topics: discussion of ideas and experiences on how metrics can be used to improve systems development and operations
The idea behind the Metrics Portal has evolved over years of sifting through piles of raw operational data, in hopes of finding that rare insight to make sense of everything. Clearly an unattainable goal…and yet, the more digging we do, the more we can learn to identify meaningful patterns in the data.
Translating Data into Action: Translating your data into actionable metrics is a three-step process centered on closing the measurement and feedback loop (link to "Translating Data Into Action" discussion):
Welcome to the Metrics Portal
Successful metrics require all three steps:
Data Collection alone won’t lead to action…people already drowning in too much data
Analysis alone won’t resonate if it is not presented well
Presentation alone won’t break through the clutter without meaningful analysis
A whole industry of vendor products are available for data collection (e.g., the so-called "ERP for IT" tools) and presentation (e.g., data mining, business intelligence, executive dashboards). But the difficult part about implementing IT metrics is the analysis step--getting people to think about how to use the data they already have. This is an area that is not well served today, an area where IT managers at companies across the spectrum are struggling to master, an area for which we hope the Metrics Portal will become a valuable tool to support your IT improvement initiatives.
