The 5 KPI's For ROI From IT

It’s possible to forecast the costs of technology, and reduce the chances of  “urgent, emergency spend”.

You have to do this over the long-term. Accurate forecasts come from investing in quality infrastructure that’s designed to accelerate growth and never hold it back. This is why you need a technology partner who’s deeply involved with your business and its long-term planning. If someone doesn’t understand where you’re going and why, how can they accurately advise on your technology?

This is an easy KPI to both understand and measure.

By tracking this, you encourage your IT partner to make realistic estimates about the length and cost of projects. Experienced IT professionals will not find it difficult to build in extra time and cost to account for foreseeable problems

It’s a common question most IT support companies get while talking to prospective new clients: How long will it take to solve problems?

The answer is “it depends”. We mean, it depends on the problem and the impact of it. All IT companies run a form of triage for problems that come in, just as emergency room doctors do in hospitals.You wouldn’t expect a broken arm to get the same amount of urgency and attention as a heart attack, because resources aren’t unlimited. It’s the same with technology issues. What’s important is your IT partner understanding which of your systems are critical to normal operations, and what’s just “annoying” when it doesn’t work properly for a short while. These boundaries should be established during onboarding with your new IT partner.

Downtime is when systems and devices are not available for your team to do their usual work.

There are two types of downtime  – planned and unexpected.

Here’s what they mean in non-tech jargon.

They're both about the backing up of your data. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is used to determine how often your data needs to be backed up. This will depend on how often it changes and how critical the data is. For example, if you were a bank, you’d want an RPO of 0 minutes. If a bank's system crashes, they need to be able to recover every single transaction that happened right up to the point of the crash. But let’s say you ran an architects’ office. Your staff might only save a few files a day. So, an RPO of 2 hours might be acceptable. It means in the event of a big crash, the worst amount of data that can be lost is 2 hours’ worth.

Setting an RPO is always a trade-off between cost and convenience. There are always clever solutions a good IT partner can create for you – for example backing everything up in real time within your office, then only sending it to a secure data center away from your office twice a day. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the length of downtime your business can tolerate until data recovery. Put another way, it’s how long you realistically have to restore full operations. Again, your critical systems will have a lower RTO than other systems. This is an important conversation to have with your IT partner.

Of course, there are other KPIs that you could measure to look even more deeply into your IT systems. But these are the ones we recommend starting with. Not only will they give you insight into how well your current infrastructure is working for you, but they will also tell you a lot about how well your IT provider is performing.