3.Translating business outcomes to IT expectations

Making sense out of business KPIs/SLAs

Once you know the business KPIs/SLAs/business events we need to translate that to a meaningful expectation on the underlying IT systems. 

Input : Business objective , KPIs /SLAs , business events calendar
Output : IT support expectations around availability , capacity & performance/throughput on each system that contributes

How do we do this? Below are the key questions to be answered 
For each business objective
  • What are all the business processes involved in accomplishing the business objectives?
  • What are the IT systems involved in delivering each business process?
  • What are the upstream and downstream systems involved?
  • What are the enabling systems involved - like ,email etc?
  • What exactly each system contributes?
  • When business will use each system heavily? 
  • What are the performance/throughput expectations at its peak? If the data flows from one system to other this question should be asked for each upstream/downstream system
  • Expectation on the availability requirements ..what each outage means to business - when a system outage cannot be tolerated
  • What are the key functionalities business is going to use to achieve their deliverables
  • What is the impact of each incident in achieving the overall business deliverable
Once the above questions are answered you should be able to translate each business KPI/SLA into meaningful IT expectations.
Now lets try to come up with a framework which can translate the existing IT report into something which truly speaks the language of business outcomes delivered.

Next >> Reporting business outcomes in IT service report


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