The poster boy for Customer Ananlytics,Harahs Entertainment, who was covered as a part of the HBR Article "Competing with Analytics" is now rethinking its IT Metrics, here is a company that is revising it list of metrics and scorecards year on year to stay real and stay fresh.

In the recent article at ComputerWorld Tim Stanley, senior vice president and CIO at Harrah's Entertainment says ""We're constantly asking ourselves whether we're measuring the right things,"

Excerpts from the Article:

Best-in-class IT organizations have gone beyond rote metrics such as system uptime and help desk problem resolution. Some IT shops on Wall Street, for example, are studying things like how many stock trades or customers they're able to support for each IT dollar they spend, says Howard Rubin, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

But these kinds of metrics are much more difficult to use than the traditional IT time and transaction measures. One of the big challenges that many IT leaders face in developing effective metrics, says Rubin, is determining which activities are under the auspices of the IT department. For instance, some user departments at financial services companies have their own LAN administrators who are outside the purview of the IT organization, says Rubin.

"There's IT everywhere, not just in the IT department but in bank branches and on the plant floor," he says. The business activity supported by IT "drifts back and forth like the eye on the head of a flounder," he adds.

Still, many IT organizations continue to struggle with mapping their performance against business outcomes. "IT has traditionally measured itself in very technical terms that don't mean much to people outside of IT," says Craig Symons, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. These include statistics about availability and costs per megabyte of computing.

Business leaders agree. "There's been a huge disconnect between what business people care about -- i.e., capabilities delivered -- and what IT people care about," such as the percentage of projects that are being delivered on time and within budget, says Christopher Lochhead, chief marketing officer at Mercury Interactive Corp., a Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of business software.

Aidan Collins, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers who works with KP-IT, calls the group's approach "an IT view of the world with financial transparency so you can talk with business executives about true life-cycle costs and true accountability within IT services."

Like Harrah's Stanley, Bentley says the metrics that the DHL Express IT organization tracks continue to evolve and mature over time. "When you start off, you're measuring the easy things," says Bentley. "Then you start linking to IT's impact on the business."

Homa puts a more personal spin on it: "The best metric is that I'm still here after 10 years."

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Prashanth Rai