I recently hosted a panel at the itSMF Australian Conference on linking data and metrics to the business to show business value. The standing room only crowd asked questions for the whole hour including: "how do I get metrics from the cloud?" or "how do we not become data junkies?" and "how do I show metrics that relate to the business?" There also was the noteworthy comment of "metric reports are not worth the trees that they kill."

One of the challenges of being the moderator is that you don't get to answer the questions in the session, so I will take this opportunity to give offer my own view to the key questions asked in the session.

Cloud - How do I show metrics?

Great question and one that I hear constantly as folks look to leverage the cloud.  Many of you already leverage some aspect of the cloud whether it is SaaS, PaaS, IaaS or any of "as a service," and if you check with the provider you will note that there are many metrics provided. The reality of these metrics is most of them are irrelevant to the information you need to verify the health of the business service being delivered. When using cloud, we need to a better job to identify and document the metrics required and incorporate them into contracts.

What do we do with the plethora of metrics that we are currently exposed to?

Throw them away! We need to identify the metrics that make sense to aggregate and expose to the business in business terms and use the remainder as support.

How do I show metrics that link to the business?

Visit the ISACA website and download COBIT 4.1 (freely available), Appendix 1 and 2 will lead you through the development of a balanced scorecard. The scorecard can link to the IT processes. and ultimately to a series of metrics which should have some connection to the business. It's a great starting point!

Consistency will be king moving forward!

There were many other questions and comments during the session with the comment of the session being how we can ensure consistency of service. The analogy given was that if your bus arrives 10 minutes early or late you can adjust your behavior to ensure that you can make the bus - but if it is 10 minutes late one day and 10 minutes early the next, the variance is totally frustrating. This is typical of IT where we are rarely consistent. This is where we should be using our technical metrics to assist in understanding the consistency of our business delivery. Once we get consistent, we have a platform from which to drive forward.