The organisation is essential for any team that must manage massive amounts of data, especially IT teams. An information technology dashboard, or IT dashboard, is a user interface designed to store and organise important IT-related information from several data sources and display it in a uniform, easy-to-access platform.
An IT dashboard can assist project managers, chief technical officers (CTOs), chief information officers (CIOs), and other IT professionals in identifying issues before they become larger problems.
The reporting capabilities of IT dashboards are an important element. Some key performance indicators (KPIs) monitor the quality of IT projects and can assist IT teams control costs, solve issues, and manage tickets more effectively.
Your data is made easier to handle by being divided into smaller real-time visual information chunks by a dashboard with the appropriate IT KPIs. These KPIs might assist you in identifying your strengths and areas that require improvement.
Here are ten important IT KPIs to make sure your dashboard offers you an accurate picture of your IT operations so that everything continues to run properly.
Accuracy of Estimates
In many IT situations, developers must estimate the amount of time required to complete a job. It’s quite difficult to predict 100% accurately every time, but the goal is to get as near as possible.
Missing the launch date due to an increased number of issues that developers must deal with is frequent in the IT industry and needs continuous tracking to be better prepared for the future. It’s also a good idea to be conscious of “only” tasks: “it’s just a tiny task, it’ll only take 10 minutes to repair it, it shouldn’t take long, and so on.”
These are frequently ad hoc jobs that create delays and missed deadlines because developers frequently misjudge the workload.
Amount Of Intrusion Attempts
Our second example, as the name implies, includes the number of weekly intrusion attempts – that is, illegal attempts to access your company’s system.
This easy KPI is further segmented by attempt type and compared to the preceding six months to observe how it evolved over time.
Real-time tracking of this information gives the IT department reliable data on the amount of danger that its system faces on a regular basis. In addition, examining the most prevalent sorts of attempts might offer insight into where you should focus your efforts.
Average Handle Time
This IT KPI is a critical measure for any project manager, as well as staff, and it allows you to track your planned activities, projects, and sprints. You may optimise each employee’s workload by analysing past sprints.
IT Support Employees per End Users
This IT KPI is self-explanatory: how many support staff does your organisation have to assist a thousand end-users?
There is no specific ratio to follow because it relies not only on the sort of people you have, but also on the product you support: a simple mobile app needs less time for support than a high-end analytics software suite. This IT KPI is especially critical for companies that are hard scaling.
IT ROI (Return on Investment)
The IT return on investment is a pretty common IT statistic that measures the effectiveness of your efforts.
An ROI study often provides a response to the age-old question, “How much bang for my buck do I get?” It is a simple way to calculate profitability by calculating how much you get back for every dollar you invest.
To take it a step further, when analysing returns, you should consider all levels of performance according to a program’s or project’s goals, rather than just obvious indicators like cost savings or revenue gains.
You will thus measure more than just financial, raw returns, but also the achievement of intended goals and the production of the desired results.
IT Costs Break Down
Another critical IT KPI you should monitor is how and where you are allocating your money. Breaking down investments into the various unit levels (software, hardware, SP, personnel) and each of their components (maintenance, infrastructure, development, operations…) will provide you with a better understanding of where the money is spent and allow you to identify your main cost drivers as well as opportunities for improvement.
This also allows for more precise financial budgeting and forecasting. However, for efficient planning, each department should ensure that its IT expense is properly measured.
IT Costs vs. Revenue
This IT KPI compares IT costs to income earned over the course of a year. It is a critical measure for IT companies that grow rapidly and have significant revenue growth.
Are the costs remaining constant as a percentage of the revenue? Or, as is often the case, are they expanding rapidly? Such a scenario is not unusual and has a negative influence on prospective revenues, which is why it is critical to watch this parameter and maintain it stable.
Another possibility is that with unchanging revenue if IT expenses continue to rise continuously over time, the impact on profit margins would be negative.
Mean Time To Detect (MTTD)
Along with intrusion attempts, one of the most important cyber security metrics to track is the mean time to detect (MTTD). This indication indicates how long a security thread goes unreported before it is addressed by someone on the IT team.
Naturally, the MTTD should always be as low as possible, because the longer it takes to detect and attack, the more time the attackers have to cause harm to the system.
Of course, the MTTD will vary according to the type of attack, since some may be more difficult to detect than others. Tracking this measure on a weekly basis might also reveal a few areas where you can improve.
Mean time to repair (MTTR)
The mean time to repair is an IT KPI that calculates the time between when an incident begins and when it is resolved. It covers the diagnostic time, the repair time, the alignment, calibration, testing, and the wait time to return to production.
It is a solid IT performance statistic since it measures how well a team approaches, responds to, and repairs an issue.
This way, you’ll know not just where you should send extra employees to solve the issues, but also how long it takes on average. This is important for long-term planning.
Open versus closed tickets
A significant number of outstanding tasks might quickly accumulate, suggesting a flaw in your current system. If you do not respond to opened tickets on a daily basis, the backlog will become out of hand.
Recovering from that point becomes difficult, thus it’s critical to keep track of your ticket backlog on a frequent basis. One method is to use a ratio to examine the difference between your open and closed tickets, indicating if your backlog is increasing or decreasing.
This comparison demonstrates how effectively various levels of support manage their ticket workload. Of course, your backlog will never be zero; ideally, you want the smallest possible backlog.
A larger number of open tickets for a certain support level, particularly those that have been backlogged for more than a month, indicates that something needs to be solved.
To overcome challenges, it may be necessary, for example, to modify resource distribution across support levels or even recruit new employees. Overall, this KPI may provide a broad picture of the health of your IT support.
