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What CIO/CTO need know?

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by ukothari 1 view

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Today many organizations excute multiple projects. I would like comments from CIO/CTO and Senior Management members on what they would like to see or need to know to manage organization effectively. In our applications we have developed dashboard and very tight MS Project integration and other business processes to provide drilldown and graphical information like

1. Total Projects/On right Track/Observe progress/Needs immediate attention

2. Enterprisewide Resource Utilization (Capacity, Worked, Billed, Idle)

3. Billing Performance, Top 5 Customers
4. Is my organization learning? (KB Articles, Added in the month etc)
5. Defects Statistics (Total, Resolved, Open, Avg. time to fix the defects)
6. Defects Impact (Rework efforts, revenue/cost of correcting defects)

There are some other Key Result Areas but we will appreciate if any other details needs to be added.

Thanks & regards...

Uday
CTO, Compulink Systems
www.ProjectByNet.com

9 replies

by jamesrl

In essense you need to determine what the CIO needs to manage, and find appropriate metrics to measure those areas.

You've got alot of project type measurements.
You can find alot of literature about balanced scorecards, and I suggest you take alook.

Some areas that we do that you don't cover:
Employee satisfaction (annual survey)
Customer satusfaction (annual survey)
More service level metrics - service availability metrics on mission critical
Problem stats - % resolved within goals
Overall budget stats
For learning, we use training days and dollars

Hope that helps.

James

by stillatit

1. From a technical standpoint, there should be a "pipeline" link to sales/contracts, so that the manager can project the impact of new projects in the late sales cycle.

2. From a human standpoint the CIO/CTO needs to actually talk to their people. A scorecard is a great tool, but it is NOT a substitute for actually knowing what is going on. If a scorecard like this is the only way a manager is informed, they will be misinformed. For example, if there are "points" for adding KB articles, subordinates will add them, but not necessarily read them. If a problem can be hidden by not setting the "needs immediate attention" flag, some subordinate will do so until the problem grows out of hand.

Good luck.

by pwilhelm

Besides just the mechanical techniques listed you will need a CIO/CTO that knows how to manage people. Once you figure out the metrics, which can certainly be a big task in itself, you need to know how to relate these numbers to the indviduals doing the work. A Senior manager has to be more than a supreme administrator. They need to have the ability to impart the vision to the staff and inspire them to go after it.

People when motivated correctly will make your list of "metric" short indeed. They will be looking proactively for solutions before a problem flares up, perhaps even solve it and tell you later. There is nothing wrong with keeping an eye on the instrument panel but I encourage you to look at a bigger view.

BTW, this attitude must come from the top down or it is doomed.

Paul Wilhelm
IT Dir
pwilhelm@cornercom.com

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