How do CIOs track benefits enabled by IT?

A concern I am hearing a lot today is how a CIO should go about attributing benefits realised by the business back to the IT initiatives that enabled them in the first place.

 

IT costs are usually tracked in the IT organisation’s budget while the benefits from IT enabled change are usually realised (and reported) in the business units of an organisation (P&L).

 

This issue is particularly challenging for the largely “intangible” infrastructure capabilities such as collaboration technology.

 

Mature benefits management disciplines are needed in IT to help create the mapping between IT enabled “potential” benefits to business realised “actual” benefits.

 

The simple example below shows a benefits map for Software Asset Management:

 

 

Infrastructure Maturity Mapped to TCO

One of the things I am really keen to do is show how improving infrastructure maturity impacts Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and the ability to generate ROI (return on Investment) from infrastructure investments.

I came across some research from Gartner where they compare Desktop TCO against various levels of “management”. The management levels they use are broadly similar to Levels 1, 2, 3 & 4 of the NIMM.

While direct costs remain fairly constant across the maturity levels, the indirect costs come down quite significantly as your infrastructure maturity improves.

In summary (my interpretation),

Going from NIMM Level 1 to NIMM Level 3will reduce Desktop TCO by approx 21%.

Going from NIMM Level 1 to NIMM Level 4 will reduce Desktop TCO by approx 42%.

Assuming that this trend will follow through to other parts of IT Infrastructure (Network TCO, Mobile TCO…) then there is a compelling TCO case to drive infrastructure maturity as well as the improvements in service and end user satisfaction.

Pilot Version of the NIMM Profiling Tool has been Released

The NIMM Profiling tool and NIMM Balanced Scorecard I have developed for the NHS is now available for testing within the NHS. The tool is intended to help NHS organisations self assess maturity against a set of suggested Infrastructure Capabilities using the NIMM levels and the NIMM balanced scorecard method. The self assessed scores are not nationally benchmarkeable since they rely on subjective self assessment, however, if the NIMM balanced scorecard guidelines are followed, it is possible to arrive at a meaningful score which can be used locally to plan and measure improvements in infrastructure maturity.

This is currently only available internally to the NHS on N3, here is the url.

http://nww.pspg.nhs.uk/iPSPG/iPSPG%20Artefacts/NIMM%20Profiling%20Tool%20Pilot%20Version%200.43.zip