Business Impact
How do I measure IT value?
IT delivers value to its customers by providing them the ability to execute business processes in an efficient and effective manner. Measuring the performance and availability of these business processes is required to determine the value delivered.
The Value at Risk visualization shown above allows you to quickly spot those areas of poor IT performance that are costing the business money, both directly through inability to perform their business activities and indirectly through such factors as missed business opportunity.
How do I invest to benefit my customers?
Developing the knowledge required to make effective IT investments has been an elusive goal for many IT executives. This knowledge must come from metric analysis which reports where IT is delivering value and where it is not. These metrics must be based on connecting IT data with the business processes and activities that IT supports.
How do I minimize business risk?
Business risk is measured by the inability of an organization to execute its business processes in an acceptable manner as determined by its stakeholders.
Which part of the business and which customers should I focus on?
Access to objective information in business terms is a requirement in order for IT to assign its resources to the business areas that need it most. A common method for measuring IT value and risk is the only way to make objective comparisons and sound decisions regarding where to concentrate precious resources.
When can I start providing true value to the business?
As soon as you have knowledge of how IT is performing in business terms.
How does EvidantSP address the area of Business Impact?
Most organizations have or are investing in transactional data collection tools from leading companies such as Mercury, IBM Tivoli, CA, Compuware, Tevron, Auditec and others. EvidantSP plugs into one or more of these tools to create a common business transaction model.
EvidantSP’s Business Activity Toolkit (BAT) provides a structure for capturing business process information including work flow, business activities, tasks, staffing models, risk factors, locations and application specifics. The result is a model of how business uses IT transactions to do their jobs.
EvidantSP combines the transactional IT data with the business model captured in BAT. By doing this, each IT transaction can be measured for its value and risk. In addition, an organization’s KPIs can be overlaid to create a correlation between direct IT impact and business results. By assigning business value and meaning to every transactional data point, a wealth of IT and business knowledge is derived.
The Value at Risk chart shown above depicts one measure of the business impact of IT. It is calculated by evaluating each IT transaction data point for its contribution to financial risk. When these calculations are rolled up over time and aggregated over business areas, an overall measure of Value at Risk results.