How can IT organizations increase efficiency and performance?

This is a very broad question but one that many IT leaders are asking. In answering this question it's helpful to look to parallels in business. Any business seeking to answer a similar set of questions would go through a process of evaluation of the current state and determine where there are issues in efficiency and performance. Once the problem areas have been determined plans for improvement can be made and implemented. Critical to the success of this type of initiative is measuring if the improvement initiatives have been successful.

The ability for any business to assess efficiency and performance on any scale requires accurate data. A business undergoing this type of assessment would look to the most up to date information on performance available. It is difficult to manage or change what you have not been tracking. Consider the process of managing the cost of support in an IT organization. Most IT organizations scale support to meet the load of work from the business and maintain services levels. But where are the support hours going? It might be possible to meet or exceed service levels with fewer staff, but it is impossible to determine if things like non business critical systems are consuming valuable support resources in absence of data.

Another example revolves around the fact that IT departments are really services organizations. Any professional services organization lives and breathes by its resource utilization data. To operate at peak efficiency IT organizations must also consider this type of metric. In a budget constrained organization resource utilization is one of the most important measures. A cross organizational view of utilization enables IT leadership to make changes in headcount allocations and distribution and tune the organization to meet services levels and get the most from its scare resources.

In the absence of this information you must take action to begin tracking the appropriate parts of the business in order that benchmarks are available for comparison during improvement efforts.

Modern businesses rely on technology to track and manage this critical information. The surge in interest around data warehousing and business intelligence is an indicator of the thirst for data that describes how business is performing for the purpose of managing improvements.

IT should be considered a business within a business, and like any business must have benchmarks by which to manage efficiency and performance improvement efforts.

IT business management systems or systems that are designed to enable the management of key IT processes can greatly assist IT management in seeking performance improvements. The impact is twofold for IT organizations that have not invested in systems for the purpose of managing IT. First, the use of integrated systems for IT management provides visibility into the data that is required to establish performance and efficiency baselines. Second, systems provide the mechanism for tuning the organization and monitoring performance improvement progress. For the most advanced IT organization, this data can not only be used to tune the performance of the organization but also the team and individuals.