IT is about Results!

There is a new movie out right now called Moneyball, and starring Brad Pitt. It tells the true story of Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team in 2002. Faced with the departure of some key players, and a low budget, Beane begins to challenge the prevailing wisdom around indicators of player performance. Instead, by applying rigorous statistical analysis (called Sabermetrics), he begins to uncover better indicators of a player’s offensive success. Armed with these new metrics, Beane is able to find players undervalued in the market, and puts together a competitive team with a fraction of the money of his competitors.

Is there a lesson here for your business, and your technology support? Absolutely.

When we talk to companies working with a traditional, reactive support company, they often speak of their vendor’s performance in terms of response time. While responsiveness is an important element of delivering technology support, it is not the best indicator of optimal technology management. Rather, we need to focus on metrics that are results-based. For us, this means 2 things:

1. Uptime. Are we achieving a high level of system availability?
2. Employee Productivity. Have we successfully removed technology management from internal employess and freed them up to focus on value-added work that drives business performance?

It is impossible to achieve good results on these 2 metrics simply by being responsive in a reactive support role. Achieving high uptime levels, and ensuring improved employee productivity requires the application of a comprehensive approach to service delivery, and one that incorporates proactive network management.

We recently gave some of our clients the opportunity to talk about the results they have seen working with 365 Technologies as their IT department. You can see what they had to say here: 365 Results

“Our network is never down”

“We’re able to get back to the business of great design”

“We have more time to focus on delivering excellence to our customers”

How are your results? Are you focused on the right things, or is a different approach needed?