ISYS90038 Chap.4 Making IT Count: Planning and IT Metrics
Making IT Count: Planning and IT Metrics
Week 4 tackles two linked problems: how to show what IT contributes, and how to plan for it. IT's value is indirect, because better IT services produce gains in other departments, and only those gains show up in business performance, so organisation-wide return figures are hard to defend.
The textbook's answer is to measure at the project level, add non-financial measures that predict future performance, and separate three tiers of metrics: enterprise, functional and project. A metrics program needs six principles, from a holistic performance focus to visibility and linked incentives, and managers are warned that metrics drive behaviour, so they should be chosen as carefully as any system.
The balanced scorecard of Kaplan and Norton balances financial measures with customer, internal process, and learning and growth perspectives. On the planning side, the module defines strategic planning as setting out a better, measurable future and choosing how to reach it, and sets out what a strategic planning document contains.
Four planning tools named in the learning outcomes, SWOT, PEST, the value chain and the five forces, complete the week, with a worked answer showing how one strength can be used to seize one opportunity.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The indirect value chain: why IT's return shows up in other people's results
- 02
Three tiers of IT metrics: enterprise, functional and project level
- 03
Six principles for a business metrics program and five warnings for managers
- 04
The balanced scorecard: financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth
- 05
Strategic planning: current state, desired future state and the actions that bridge them
- 06
The strategic planning document: foundations, objectives, outcomes, analyses and maintenance
- 07
Planning tools: SWOT, PEST, the value chain and the five forces
Worked example · free
Build a four-perspective scorecard for a museum's IT
- 1Financial: cost per online visit, which links IT spending to the stated goal (P2, L3).
- 1Customer: online visitor satisfaction measured by a short survey on the collection site.
- 1Internal business process: time taken to publish a newly digitised object online.
- 1Learning and growth: IT staff retention over twelve months, answering the staffing problem (P4, L8).
Key terms
- Enterprise measures
- Metrics linking IT's work to organisational performance, such as customer satisfaction and corporate financial results.
- Functional measures
- Metrics describing how the IT function runs, such as operational performance and development productivity.
- Project-level metrics
- Measures of whether an individual project team delivered its intended value, such as on-time delivery.
- Strategic planning
- Setting out a better future in terms that can be measured, then choosing the most effective way to reach it.
- PEST analysis
- An environmental scan of political, economic, sociocultural and technological factors outside the organisation's control.
- Value chain
- Porter's view of a firm as a chain of activities that turns inputs into value for customers.
- Plan maintenance
- The schedule of reviews and amendments that keeps a strategic plan current, with changes tracked.
- Non-financial measures
- Indicators such as customer and employee satisfaction that predict future performance.
Making IT Count: Planning and IT Metrics FAQ
Why is it hard to measure IT's contribution to profit?
IT works indirectly: it improves the work of other departments, and only that improved work appears in business results. Process alignment, adoption, training and data quality all sit between spending and outcome, so project-level measures are more defensible.
What are the four balanced scorecard perspectives?
Learning and growth, internal business process, the customer, and the financial view. The scorecard balances financial results against the other three so that strategy is translated into a coherent set of measures.
How do SWOT and PEST differ?
SWOT covers internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats for one organisation. PEST scans broad political, economic, sociocultural and technological forces. They work together: PEST sets the context and SWOT places the organisation in it.
What should a strategic planning document contain?
Mission, vision and values; strategic directions with objectives, targets and measures; expected outcomes; supporting analyses such as SWOT; and a schedule for reviewing and amending the plan.
Why do staff resist IT metrics?
They often expect accountability to make their jobs harder. The module treats that resistance as temporary when metrics are easy to understand and tied to incentives that reach all IT staff.
Exam move
Practise two short routines. For metrics, take any objective in a case and propose one operational and one outcome-linked measure, naming the tier and the stakeholder each serves. For planning tools, fill a SWOT from a case in ten minutes with one cited line per item, keep internal and external items apart, and finish by linking one strength to one opportunity.
Rehearse the scorecard by writing one measure per perspective for an organisation you know, and check that each could actually be collected.
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