How do you measure the success and effectiveness of an IT Infrastructure service environment? Service quality and cost efficiency!   

Most IT organizations measure quality of service as defined in Service Level Agreements, Customer Satisfaction surveys, and KPI’s.  However, measuring cost efficiency is more complicated. 

Budgeting and expense management indicate whether your costs are going up, down, or staying level. 

Benchmarks provide a comparison against historical data, generally lack real-time market intelligence, and, potentially, risk inaccurate service level and functional comparisons.

The solution is an IT Infrastructure Assessment that baselines your existing operations by looking at your staffing, the technology and financials, followed by a comparison to real-time market pricing and service offerings.  With this approach, you will know how your costs compare to today’s current market by service area, giving you the information to decide whether it is worth pursuing a more detailed evaluation of potential solutions.

The starting point is defining the scope for the assessment and marketplace comparisons.  You can look all aspects of your infrastructure and budget ensuring that the sum of the costs for the individual components matches to your total IT budget. This is especially beneficial when some of the costs fall into a “shared services” category where a budget item is for a function that supports multiple components of the IT infrastructure.  For example, an Operations Center typically supports all technology platforms, so that the costs must be allocated to the various components (network, mainframe, UNIX, Linux and Windows). Even if the eventual decision is to selectively outsource, having the results of a complete assessment will help in identifying the residual costs of the selected component(s).

The key skill sets to perform a fair and balanced assessment are a combination of senior level operational, management, financial, technical, and industry knowledge, as well as an un-biased view of current service costs and output as compared to external service providers.  The resulting assessment must be an accurate reflection of your environment and the costs (as confirmed by your management team), yet address the information required to perform a fair and balanced comparison versus outside alternatives (as confirmed by outside experts).

An accurate and complete assessment will include the following components:

• Financial information:  budgets, asset info, contractual obligations, etc.
• Technology information: hardware, software, configuration, volumes, projects, etc.
• Staffing information:  organization charts, staffing levels, job functions & responsibilities, etc.
• Corporate and IT Strategy & cultural factors, projections, etc.

The final results of an IT Infrastructure Assessment will include a narrative profile of your IT infrastructure services and environment with summary financial information, a set of financial dashboards that depict various views of your current IT Infrastructure costs, and a presentation that summarizes the first two, plus presents alternative delivery options along with indicative pricing along with a business case that compares your existing costs plus residual expenses to the total cost of the proposed alternatives.

The goal of this exercise is to assure you are providing the best service at the best price, starting with a strong baseline and using this baseline to research marketplace alternatives.