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Volume 8 Issue 3 December 2005
Designing a process-oriented framework for IT performance management systems
Sertac Son1, Tim Weitzel1 and Francois Laurent2
1Institute for Information Systems, Frankfurt University, Germany
2European Central Bank, France |
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In recent years, control and governance of internal services such as Information Technology (IT) have become quite critical in organisations due to the enormous size of their expenditure. As a result, managers have faced growing pressure to measure the performance of IT departments. Several concepts have been developed during the last few years such as IT governance, IT scorecards, and benchmarking that have been considered by IT and business executives. But surprisingly, a recent study by the IT Governance Institute (ITGI) that covered 335 CEOs and CIOs in 21 countries, reported “while more than 91 percent of executives recognize that information technology (IT) is vital to the success of their businesses, more than two-thirds of CEOs are not comfortable answering questions about governance and control over their IT processes.” The study validates that the major problem continues to be “the inadequate view of how well IT is performing” (ITGI, 2004). Hence, decision-makers and stakeholders within private and public companies are insisting that IT executives provide hard facts on mission and IT performance. As such, a promising performance management system is required: setting performance targets, designing efficiency and effectiveness measure, systematically and accurately measuring outcomes, and then using the results for fact-based decision-making.
This paper shows, which concepts and frameworks currently exist to measure the performance of the IT department and its delivered IS services. We discuss how a performance management system might be designed and implemented with the purpose to monitor and improve the IT function within a major financial institution in Europe. Finally, this paper provides lessons learned and some recommendations for further research in the area of IT performance management.
Keywords: Performance metrics, balanced scorecard, causality, performance manager, accounting
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