The consequences of technology failures, such as system crash, cyber breach or sluggish apps performance can be devastating. It affects businesses, operations, customers and users. It could even be a life-or-death matter in the event of a disrupted surgical operation or a breached IoT sensor in an autonomous vehicle.
In my incubating years of career in management, I was quite struggle with the performance of IT. Not because we performed poorly as a team, but our positive results did not necessarily resonate well with the business. Could it be a stereotype in the community I supported, an excuse from the responsible party, or indeed substandard IT work?
In the storm of digital transformation today, both the Business and IT are tightly coupled to the extent that one’s performance is dependent on the other. For instances, an ill-formed data-driven workflow could not benefit from simply automation if we failed to have an integrated data source, and incoherent data sets will frustrate our customers upon receiving duplicated marketing materials in regardless of the system performance. In such situations when both parties’ performance is at stake, it could lead to many unpleasant arguments, fault findings and finger-pointing in the project room.
Performance is not measurable without the indicators defined, commonly known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in many organizations. More specific to the technology as it cuts across a variety of business functions, the defined KPIs should align to the business goals and thus, encourage co-ownerships. It should also appeal to the watchful stakeholders, like the funding and risk management entities across the enterprise.
The Seven Performance Indicators
If I take a business perspective, a high-quality system shall deliver accuracy, performance, security, stability and be user-friendly.
Accuracy – it refers to the precision of the constructed system in meeting the specific business requirements and ensuring the important aspects of data integrity, authenticity and correctness in data processing and presentation of information. From my experience, data quality is a make or break to your project. It is also the hardest to deal with in an environment with dispersed data sets and multiple ownerships.
Performance – a high performing system will provide good and consistent response time to support the designed workload as agreed between the IT and Business. Typically, this would require adequately sized system capacity, optimized database queries and rigorous load-testing in various use scenarios before releasing it for general use.
Security – system security is utmost important. It concerns the required defending tools, best practices, controls, methodologies, and threats intelligence, etc. deployed to safeguard the digital assets, personal data and privacy. Any security events, real-time alerts and triggers to the intended responders should be defined prior to the system development. Besides the technical means, continuous trainings and user education are essential to mitigate the risk of humans commonly regarded as the weakest link in cyber defence.
Stability – a stable system will have minimal unscheduled disruption, typically quantified by the uptime per year as committed by the IT in agreement with the Business. There are numerous mechanisms, like having standby hardware, secondary site and dual transmission links, etc. to ensure continuous operations should any failure happen to the primary resource. The extent of redundancy is often a trade-off between the cost and business criticality, and again a decision of the IT and Business.
User-Friendliness – last but certainly not the least is user-friendliness that a poor user interface with inconsistent layouts, misleading error messages, and cluttered clickable actions will just annoy the users. Web design is a separate professional skill from IT and some organizations have resorted to external help on design thinking to address the issue.
As IT is mostly concerned with the continuous operation and changes to the system at the end of the day, there are additional quality attributes, like Scalability, Maintainability and Supportability to be cared for. Unless we take further efforts to formalize it across the enterprise, these KPIs are, unfortunately, less known or perceived lower in priority to the business.
Scalability – it is like gauging the IT’s ability to commission additional system resources to cater for the projected increase in workload within just weeks or the sooner the better. It goes beyond just Cloud for the solution as one may need to review the respective scale up for the in-house supporting services like firewall, intrusion detection, load balancer, Internet bandwidth, transaction logging and data backup capacity, etc.
Maintainability – a hard-to-maintain system will be rigid to adapt to or unable to cope with the business changes without a major overhaul or huge investment. Addressing the issue would require a combination of supporting technologies, modular software design, technical skills and experience, etc.
Supportability – IT is a knowledge economy. Knowledge, skills and expertise (KSEs) prevail for a high-quality system. When a coding error, configuration mistake or operation oversight could result in dire consequences, do we ever concern if we have the required KSEs and human capital to support and sustain the continual operations of a newly adopted technology?
In summary, IT performance is a collective effort of the organization. It must be defined in the perspectives of the IT and Business with the objectives below:
1. Bring clarity of digital performance, objective assessment, and harmony across the enterprise in the pursuit of business transformation.
2. Nurture a digital-literate community for further work on technology governance and strategies to achieving the performance goals.
3. Make clear to the stakeholders for the essential investments and priorities of IT for the overall organizational performance, rather than technology performance.