Friday, November 8, 2024

HP Launches Executive Scorecard to Track IT

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How well is your IT organization performing?

That’s not an easy question to answer and it requires a degree of detail, analytics and reporting that not all organizations have at their fingertips. HP this week is launching a new tool with the HP IT Executive Scorecard to help meet that need. The scorecard is part of the HP IT Performance suite, which ties together multiple HP software applications to help monitor and manage enterprise networks.

“The HP IT Performance Suite is bringing together an entire family of products together from HP Software and putting it together in such a way that can give unique insights into the overall performance of the IT organization,” Piet Loubser, Senior Director, Product Marketing at HP, told InternetNews.com.

Loubser added that the unique element with the suite is the IT executive scorecard which provides an overall view of the organization.

“What we’ve done is create a balanced scorecard approach that comes pre-populated with a number of best practice Key Performance Indicators (KPI),” Loubser said. “Performance data collected from the underlying applications is fed into the best practices KPIs to provide unique insights for IT leadership.”

Data inputs can come from HP Software including lifecycle management, operations as well as security systems. Loubser added that the system can pull in data from non-HP software as well.

“We have an open data model that feeds the Executive Scorecard,” Loubser said.

The open data model is powered by technology from SAP. Loubser explained that HP uses an OEM technology from SAP called business objects data services.

“The process is essentially to map the new source to the existing known target schema in the IT Performance Suite,” Loubser said.

Loubser noted that there is a lot of data that can be collected on a network, and that the purpose of the new system isn’t about blasting all that data to the CIO. Rather the goal is to show meaningful data, by way of the KPIs and how the business is measuring up against them.

Going a step further, HP also realized that different executives within an organization are likely to have different KPIs that are relevant to them. As such, HP is also bundling different versions of the scorecard, with the first one being one targeted at CIOs.

“We think about IT value, customer satisfaction, operational excellence and future orientation,” Loubser said. “So when you look at IT value we’ll be looking at things like CAPEX versus OPEX ratios.”

Another KPI is called innovation delivery that tracks spending on maintenance versus new capabilities. Loubser added the there is also a KPI to measure the ratio between the IT plan of record versus total business revenue plan of record.

“On average we know that IT budgets are around 3.5 percent of total revenue,” Loubser said. “So the system has the ability to measure things not just within the IT meaning, but also linking that up to external business KPIs.”

The scorecard approach can also help IT administrators to make a business case for cloud services. Loubser noted that there isn’t a single KPI that will simply say Yes or No to cloud services, but there are KPIs which will help IT to make the decision.

“Time to value for new projects is a derivative metric for cloud,” Loubser said. “I could start off looking at the total cost for delivering a service, this will then enable you to have a point of view where you know the costs and can then see how much the same service would cost to run as a cloud service.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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