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Important IT KPIs That Your Business Should Track

By April 5, 2022No Comments12 min read
IT KPIs Business Should Track

Small businesses are moving towards digital solutions. You need to invest your money if you want to use the latest digital solutions. It is not easy to manage your IT program if you are not tracking your IT KPIs. Key performance indicators will help you in checking your progress towards your goals. However, you can’t use every metric as KPI.

It is important to know which KPIs you should track. You should know about the KPIs that will help you in checking the success of your projects. IT KPIs will help you in tracking your IT infrastructure. It will help you in making data-driven decisions for optimizing network performance. In this article, we are going to track important IT KPIs that your business should track.

IT KPIs that your business should track

  1. Issue Handle Time

This IT KPI will help you in understanding how much time your team is taking to accomplish their tasks. The best way to check this is by tracking the number of tasks that your team is completing in a fixed interval of time.

For example, you can track your team’s performance for 10-days. This will help you in evaluating every team member’s performance. You might find that some people are taking more time to complete the same task. This data will help you in making better decisions. Project managers can use this data for assigning the right tasks to the right team members. It is a good idea to track the issue handle time every week. This will help you in understanding your team’s performance.

  1. IT Return on Investment

Your IT ROI will help you in measuring the efficiency of your IT spending. This metric will simply help you in understanding if you are getting good returns from our IT investment. You might think that measuring ROI is straightforward. However, your ROI will include many parameters. You should measure all performance parameters like the number of customers satisfied, clients gained, time saved, and cost savings.

It is simple to calculate the ROI of your IT systems. You first need to figure out the benefits of your IT investment and then you need to divide it with the cost of your investment. A higher percentage simply means that you have a good ROI. However, most important thing is that your ROI should increase with time.

It is a good idea to track your IT ROI after every month. This will help you in checking if your IT investments are actually helping your business.

  1. Mean time between failures(MTBF)

MTBF will help you in determining the average time between a system failure and its resolution. If your MTBF is higher, then your system will take more time to work after failing. The definition of system failure will vary according to your business needs. However, it will generally include things like downtime, connectivity issues, and system crashes.

Your MTBF is interlinked with your MTTR (Mean time to repair). It is very easy to calculate your business MTBF. All you need to do is divide your total operational hours by the number of failures. If this number is greater, then it will take more time to fix your systems.

  1. Mean time to Repair (MTTR)

This is another very important IT KPI that you should track. It is the average time it takes to fix a failed system, device, or component. Many IT professionals also refer to MTTR as Mean time to recovery. It is the time between failure discovery and recovery of systems. MTTR will help you in predicting how much time it will take your IT team to recover your systems after some event.

You can easily calculate your MTTR. It is the unplanned maintenance time spent divided by the number of failures. You can use this formula for determining how much time it will take you to recover your systems.

  1. Percentage of projects on budget and on time

You can measure your business performance by tracking the projects that you are completing on budget, on spec, and on time. This simply means that your project should meet the requirements. Project authorization forms will help you in gathering this data. It will require your teams to provide information about their project and their performance.

This data will help you in identifying costly projects. It will also help you in shutting down programs that are not helping your business. This metric should be tracked after every month. If you can’t track this monthly, then you should track this quarterly at least.

  1. IT Spend vs IT Plan

This metric will help you in comparing your actual IT spending with your expected IT budget. If you want to check if your IT is meeting your expectations, then you need to track this metric. This will help you in finding areas of your IT network where you are overspending. You can redirect these resources to other IT areas where you are underspending.

It is important to measure your IT plan vs spend if you want to effectively plan your IT budget. This will help you in finding anomalies in your IT budget before it gets out of hand. For example, if some project is taking more time, then you are spending more money on it.

You can easily calculate this metric. All you need to do is divide your IT spending with your IT budget. It is a good idea to track this metric quarterly and monthly. This will help you in reprioritizing projects. Also, it will help you in reallocating your funds and budget.

  1. RPO or Recovery Point Objective

RPO is the maximum amount of data that you can lose if your business is hit by a system failure or disaster. For example, your IT systems might go down at 4 p.m. If you want all your data till 2 p.m. to be available, then your RPO is going to be 2 hours. Healthcare and financial businesses generally have very less RPO.

Every business is going to have a unique RPO. After your RPO has reached the threshold, the data loss can cause a huge impact on your business operations. Your critical systems are going to have a lower RPO.

It is important to determine your RPO first. Variables like data storage will help you in determining your business RPO. You should also consider the cost of lost data and operations. The cost of using Disaster recovery solutions will also affect your RPO. If you want to reduce your RPO, then you need to invest in better DR solutions. IT compliance requirements will determine the amount of data that you can lose. Industry-specific factors are also going to affect the RPO. Health records and financial transactions should be updated regularly. Thus, they will have lower RPO.

  1. RTO or Recovery Time Objective

Your business RTO or Recovery time objective will help you in creating a successful DR strategy or plan. It is the maximum downtime that your business can tolerate. Thus, you need to recover your IT systems before you hit this time limit. It will help you in protecting your business from unacceptable consequences like extended downtime, reputation loss, and lost data.

There is no perfect RTO for every business. You need to consider critical components before you determine the RTO of your business. It will mainly depend on your business type. If you are operating in the healthcare or financial industry, then downtime can be detrimental to your business. You will have a very less RTO. However, normal businesses can have more flexible RTO. Your RTO will also affect your customer’s experience. If you can quickly recover your IT systems, then your customers will be happy. Extended downtime can lead to lost revenue and sales.

  1. Server uptime and downtime

Downtime is simply how long your system is not up or operational. Uptime will help you in calculating the time your system has been up. For example, if your business is down for one hour every 24 hours then your uptime will be only 96%. You might think that this is a good uptime but it is actually very bad uptime. Companies are always aiming for at least 99.9% uptime. If your uptime is below 99.9%, then you need to upgrade your IT strategy. A good uptime will help you in reducing the chance of losing clients, data, and productivity.

You can easily calculate the uptime of your business. All you need to do is divide the total time – downtime with the total amount of time. Almost every business is tracking its uptime and downtime. This will help you in improving your business performance.

  1. IT support employees per user

This KPI will help you in determining how many IT employees are available for helping your end-users. There is no perfect ratio for all businesses. If you have more IT support employees for your end-users, then you can quickly resolve your end-user tickets. This IT KPI is very important for your business. It will help you in scaling up your business. Your business will grow with time. Thus, you will need more IT professionals for supporting your clients and teams.

You can easily calculate this by dividing the number of IT support employees by total end users. It is difficult to serve all your end-users. Thus, most businesses are working with good MSPs for solving this problem. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire will help you in gaining access to the best IT support team and tools. They will help you in providing the best IT support to your end-users. You don’t need to worry about hiring more IT employees for helping your end-users. Bleuwire will help you in quickly scale up your business.

Why you should track IT KPIs?

You can’t measure your IT performance until you are measuring it. These IT metrics are only helpful if you are tracking them properly. You should prioritize IT KIPs which will help you in measuring your business goals. This will help you in focusing your efforts on important areas of improvement. Your efforts will help you in increasing your performance management and strategy execution.

All these IT KPIs will require fact-based information. You can use this data for measuring the progress of your organization. All this data will help you in telling your business story. For example, server uptime is used by almost every business for checking their IT strength. If you are comparing server uptime every month, then it will help you in understanding your IT infrastructure performance.

You should check the IT KPIs that are relevant to your business. These IT KPIs will help you in taking better decisions. They will help you in achieving your strategic goals. Focusing on specific IT technology KPIs will help you in getting a better ROI on your IT investments. This is very important for every business as every business is moving towards a digitized world.

Conclusion

IT KPIs will help you in understanding the overall performance of your IT systems. You will also have access to other important data like efficiency and cost. If you don’t know how to track your KPIs, then you should work with a good MSP. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire will help you in tracking your IT KPIs.

They are not providing the break-fix model to businesses. Break-fix IT model will hold your business growth back. Bleuwire IT services team will help you in finding the right IT KPIs for your business. These IT KPIs will help you in predicting and avoiding problems. They will help you in avoiding costly data breaches and downtime. You can also outsource your IT support need to Bleuwire. They will help you in providing 24/7 IT support to your employees and end-users. You don’t need to worry about hiring an IT support team for helping your end-users. This will also help you in simplifying your IT budget. You only need to pay a fixed monthly fee to your IT partner. If you need more information regarding IT services, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™  services and solutions in how we can help your business.