[dsr_]

Which of these hypothetical situations is more realistic?

CEO: "I see that we had 99.994% uptime for the last six months, and we came in very close to the forecasted budget. Well done, engineers!"

CEO: "I see that we had 99.9% efficient usage for the last six months, and we reduced our budget. Well done, engineers!"

Neither scenario is realistic, of course. Uptime is nice and efficiency is nice and budgets are nice, but what the CEO is actually interested in is:

VP Customer Support: "Our satisfaction rate is up, call quality metrics are great. I looked over the call stats and it looks like we're no longer getting complaints about performance or unreachability."

[parasubvert]

I've worked with the executives of some large banks, telecoms, and transportation companies. The CEO and board generally only has held the IT team accountable to budgetary performance and risk (uptime, intrusion, regulatory) metrics. The only IT impact on customer sat is uptime, by the traditional view.

One bank IT group I know that reports on uptime to their business partners relative to operating expense, prints the charts and graphs on plotter paper weekly and posts them in the cafeteria. Most of their bonus is directly tied to those numbers. So, "cut costs and keep me up".

Delivery IT groups are very rarely measured by customer satisfaction, they're measured by project and budget performance to baseline (on time, on budget, etc). Customer sat is the responsibility of the business partners that drive the requirements, programs, etc.

This this effective? Not really. If they recognized Lean product development principles they'd incentivize everything by end-to-end cost of delay first, and risk reduction second.

[otterley]

Unfortunately it's usually some layer of middle management that is charged with making the infrastructure capacity planning decisions, and their performance is often measured by different metrics than those that the CEO cares about. Diverging incentives lead to absurd outcomes.