Measuring ITSM: Measuring, Reporting, and Modeling the IT Service Management Metrics that Matter Most to IT Senior Executives

by Randy A. Steinberg

How do you measure and report your IT services and processes? Which metrics matter the most to senior executives?Finally, here is a book that shows you how! Not theory, but a practical guide that shows you the operational metrics to use and how these can be calculated into key performance indicators (KPIs) and critical success factors (CSFs) that resonate with senior management. In this book, you will learn about the Defining and building a comprehensive metrics program Metrics that are the most important and how to calculate them How to measure your IT services Tips and suggestions for what to do if inadequate tools and reporting exist Suggested approach for how to build your metrics program step-by-stepIn addition, this book directs you to free sources for IT service management process and service metrics and reporting dashboards that you can use yourself. Simply enter your key operational metrics and the KPIs and CSFs get automatically calculated! “A comprehensive guide for building any service management metrics program with all the information you need in one place!”“No theory here . . . this gives us real metrics we can easily go after.”“A fantastic addition to our IT service management solution set!”

Genres: Business

199 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 2, 2006

Reviews

[Pete Olds · Rating 2 out of 5]

Any book like this is going to be difficult. This particular book is intended for the absolutely novice to ITIL or ITSM in general. For those not used to using metrics, it presents a useful overview of what to collect, and what value that information may be (and all kudos to the author, they include things beyond the normal Incident, Change, Problem Management that appears to occupy 80% of similar texts).

For those who have used metrics to manage business units before, it is probably a little light to be useful.

My view if you are new to ITSM and trying to pick it up in a hurry, this might be useful. You can read the 150 odd pages in less than and a couple of hours (and there is quite a bit of repetition) so it is not a huge investment in time.

If you have much of a background in IT / IS Management, there probably isn't really much to keep you enthralled here. Still, I expect it will be a useful thing to have in the library so I can pass it around no IT business colleagues to get them thinking.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's not a lot of books out there that tries to spell out a specific metrics program for ITSM. The metrics provided in this book are rather simplistic but it provides a hierarchy of operational metrics to KPI to CSFs to a context for a balance scorecard. And most important, it tells you to start measuring and stop making excuses to not measure. Start somewhere and then improve. Review with stakeholder, feed service improvement programs and measure, report, improve again.

I wish there were better books than this on this topic but most of the literature seems to be about saying that you should use business metrics and not operational metrics - and then stops there. oh well.

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lists and lists of metrics including operational metrics, key performance indicators (KPI) and critical success factors (CSF).

You can always find some interesting metrics in a book like this, but I came away from the book with little real appreciation and understanding of the area. It is particularly skimpy on modeling metrics, the sheer number of metrics will glaze senior executives eyes and numb their minds, and, in my opinion, the book does not really help bridge the IT-Senior Management gap.

The book should be used with caution by IT managers who can use their common sense and their experience in sifting through the tables of metrics.

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