Metrics That Matter - Part 4 Server to Sysadmin Ratio
Fourth in a four part series on key metrics related to the IT Controls Performance Study.
In virtually every vocation, there are simple organizational indicators that are used to benchmark effectiveness and efficiency. A sales organization may want to benchmark itself against competitors by calculating its revenue per quota-bearing salesperson. If company management desires to increase the revenue-to-salesperson metric, they cannot achieve it by merely firing salespeople! Instead, they must do myriad things to systematically increase their sales productivity and sustain it over time. The outcome of pulling this off successfully is that the organization may very well end up hiring even more sales staff to continue their growth.
In the same way, the server/sysadmin ratio serves as an easy-to-calculate indicator of IT organization effectiveness and efficiency. It is not a management metric, but it is an interesting indicator. A far more tactical metric is percentage of time spent on unplanned work, and benchmarking suggests a linear relationship between unplanned work and the server/sysadmin ratio.
How do high performers maintain such high server/sysadmin ratios to accomplish both effectiveness and efficiency? The two controls common in high performers—they actively monitor systems for unauthorized change, and have defined consequences for intentional, unauthorized changes—result in a culture of change and culture of causality. All the hard work and process improvement initiatives pay off not only in less time spent on unplanned work and better service levels, but better efficiencies as well.
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