Most IT managers are coming to realise that in the 21st century IT needs to focus on providing services. Technology facilitates the provides of IT services, rather than being an end goal in itself. What does this mean for the measurement of the performance of IT departments or external IT service providers?

 
Well, it means that all your measures should come back to how effectively you are delivering services that meet the needs of your customers, and how satisfied they are with the provision of those services. To achieve this, you should start with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and customer satisfaction surveys.
 
Customer Satisfaction Surveys: In terms of customer satisfaction a blend of two survey approaches can be very useful if done right. I'd recommend:
 
1. A periodic (e.g. annual) survey based on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) approach. NPS is very simple and yet very revealing, based on the proven data in terms of how detractors (those who do not rate your service well) and promoters (those who really rate you) behave and impact your reputation. The advantage of these surveys is that they can offer a broader view of satisfaction with your service, both in terms of a longer term perspective and also because they can cover not only satisfaction with availability, incident response, but also project performance and other factors.
 
2. A transactional survey, surveying customers in regards to specific incidents (and possibly service requests too) that have just been closed. This will provide you with a month on month trend so you can measure and report satisfaction throughout the year, reduce the nasty shocks, and be able to act upon it in a timely manner. This too should be as simple as possible while meeting the needs of what you want to discover. Frequency of sending a survey link depends on the volume of incidents and the limitations of your Service Desk and survey tools. Integrated tools that are as automated as possible are preferable, but this may not be possible without heavy financial investment. SharePoint and surveymonkey are other alternatives. You need to keep both surveys as simple as possible for the customers to maximise response and minimise negativity about the survey process itself.
 
Incident SLAs/ITIL Service Level Management: Incident SLAs and the application of ITIL Service Level Management to those SLAs are also very important in measuring the service provided to customers.
 
1. Your SLAs should be built around meeting the needs of the business. This means your prioritisation of incidents should reflect the impact of that incident on the business/business process. If you have adopted a service focus then the impact of a given IT service on the ability of the business to function should be clearer.
 
2. They should evolve periodically through a process of review, as business needs change.
 
3. Whichever board or body approves IT funding needs to have some high level understanding of this Service Level Management process and its link to business need so they can make an informed decision on the budgets they are approving, or indeed rejecting!
 
4. To make all of this usable you need to have good reporting and a usable SLA dashboard or similar in place so that management and stakeholders have visibility of how well IT is performing.
 
Availability: You should also be looking at improving satisfaction by reducing incidents/outages/downtime by maximising the availability of systems, and having associated measures (SLAs again) and reports in place. Some key points on this:
 
1. Technology solutions will only get you part of the way. The ITIL disciplines of Change Management, Problem Management, and Availability Management are very valuable in achieving this. I have seen this first in organisations where, for example, website uptime is directly linked to revenue. Critical/Major Incident Management is also valuable in assisting with this.
 
2. An effective Business Continuity Planning process can also compliment your efforts in this area.
 
3. You also need to ensure that the business is made aware of the good work you are doing in this area. Sadly, people often only notice when things go wrong. Your communications strategy is vital in this. Do you send a newsletter out every two months? Do you present periodically to key business leaders? Is there a homepage where it is useful for the end users to go which also has brief headlines of good news stories? You need a method which will make your customer sit up and go ‘oh, yes, that system has been a lot more stable recently. Great!’ One would hope that if you do improve systems availability this would be reflected in your periodic NPS customer survey anyway, but it shouldn't do any harm to occasionally point out your good work!
 
Project Performance: You should also look specifically at satisfaction in your performance in delivering IT projects. While your periodic NPS survey should encompass this as part of the bigger picture, a more detailed focus on project satisfaction should be included in your overall picture somewhere. A Post Implementation Review should address as part of its goals the level of satisfaction of key stakeholders and end users of the output of the project, both of whom should be considered customers of the project. As the old adage goes, if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. So if you don't have good measures in place, what are you waiting for?