This past week I spent some time thinking about the importance of metrics in an EA program, and more specifically, the importance of metrics that have a strong connection to the business. When it comes to a successful EA program, I’m more concerned about implementing business-oriented metrics as opposed to the metrics that are more internal to the EA Team, such as refresh cycles, the amount of staff trained, and the number of variances. The business is going to care a lot more amount cost, quality, revenue, and productivity metrics than internal facing EA metrics. It’s the business-oriented metrics that will drive engagement and a stronger partnership.
The problem with the business-oriented metrics is with the ability to follow through on them and to actually implement the measurements. It seems wherever I go in my career, the list of desired business metrics is quite long while the list of business metrics that can easily be implemented and measured is extremely short.
The reasons are typically the same - it’s the software systems and databases used for day-to-day operations. They either don’t have the data needed, they have the data in a manner that makes the measurements complicated, difficult, and suspect, or there are multiple systems in use that makes data gathering extremely time-consuming and costly. These are all problems that can be solved, but when time and cost are considered, the desired measurements get shelved for a more convenient time (which rarely arrives).
When contemplating this reality, I was struck by the notion that software and data structures usually are not designed with ease of measurement in mind (especially for business metrics). We design for performance, we design for usability, we design for reusability, and we design for ease of maintenance, but I don’t think we design for ease of measurement. We need to give ease of measurement serious forethought (rather than the typical afterthought) when designing systems and data structures.
This is a natural area for EA to provide leadership and guidance throughout the neverending journey to the future state. If EA takes the lead on designing for ease of measurement, the business will become more engaged and the partnership between IT and the business will be strengthened. One final thought from the world of Lean Six Sigma and the book “Making Quality Work: A Leadership Guide for the Results-Driven Manager” (Chang, Labovitz, Rosansky, 1994):
“The World-Class organization is continuously bathed in a stream of integrated data.”
References
Chang, Y.S., Labovitz, George, Rosansky, Victor. (1994). Making Quality Work: A Leadership Guide for the Results-Driven Manager, Oliver Wight Ltd Publishing
Hi Scott,
ReplyDeleteA very interesting perspective on how EA can facilitate the creation of systems which can provide measurements with ease. I think any effort whether EA related or any domain related should have some kind of a measurement associated with it. This is the age of Information and metrics play a key role especially when associated with business. I like the measurement concept you are deriving through this post on systems and data. I am sure the business leaders will strongly agree and appreciate seeing business-oriented metrics than any IT specific metrics.
Great thought and thanks for sharing.
Veena.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteInterestingly last Sunday, my wife and I were talking about how the growing obsession with data for metrics can actually be so cumbersome, that we lose sight of the primary mission -- particularly in customer-facing scenarios at the expense of customer care. I made a note of it, and will make sure to write about this at length in my future blogs. So, yours this week is smack right on the bull's eye.
Metrics are important - no debate there. But as you correctly pointed out, we need to devise ways of addressing the collection process so that it does not get in the way. New technologies sprout everywhere. For example, the technology behind twitter is something to consider along these lines -- small bursts of data in terms of like-dislike votes can provide responsive polls on how an initiative or process is doing.
Thanks for adding to our collective insights.
Ian
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Hello Scott,
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading through your post, all I could do was nod my head and think to myself “this guy is literally hitting the nail on the head”. While I was apart of multiple EA programs for First Data, I literally wanted to pull my hair out because of all the metrics I needed to sift through to get one answer. After finding the metric I “needed”, I always thought to myself “who thought that this was the best way to capture the changes required for this solution?” While evaluating the metric, I was realizing from a security perspective that the intended metric was inadequate to determine if the solution would work, who the true owner was depending on business area, and if their was a backup plan if the implementation failed because the technology was unable to perform the goal in its current-state. For one of the solutions, the EA team (from what I am aware of) is still trying to figure out how to move the current-state of one of their payment systems front-ends to support additional features without rebuilding the information system from the bottom up. Granted, hindsight is one thing that every leader wishes they had, but in this situation it was actually better to rebuild the information system to support the new business requirements rather than making changes to their existing infrastructure.