As a leader of your technology organization, you most likely face the perennial measurement issue of misalignment.

This misalignment manifests in various ways, differing in scope and intensity. One of the most critical areas where this shows up, however, is metrics. Tech leaders often grapple with finding a measurement approach that drives alignment. Why does this matter? According to Forrester, companies with high alignment experience nearly twice as much revenue growth compared to those without it. The most common misalignments we’ve identified include the following:

  • There’s a lack of linkages between technology metrics and organizational strategic goals. This stems from the traditional approach of measuring tech success with an inward focus instead of being business- and customer-led. Portfolio performance indicators such as being on schedule and on budget are important but are operationally oriented and don’t reflect how they link to quantifiable customer and business outcomes that are crucial to achieving your overall organization’s strategic goals.
  • Your tech metrics and your peers’ metrics are out of sync. Your peers such as the chief marketing officer, chief data officer, or chief experience officer have their own metrics, and more often than not, your metrics look very different or speak a different language compared to theirs. This becomes problematic over time with value capture, leading to a struggle to articulate how the tech organization helps your peers achieve their goals and eventually drive business success. Worse still, sometimes misalignment might lead to conflicts; for instance, the tech team might have minimizing error rates as a metric, which could lead developers to create additional, sometimes onerous, verification steps, thereby increasing customer effort to complete tasks.
  • Your tech metrics are driving the wrong behaviors and actions, creating a disconnect between intended and actual outcomes. It’s important to evaluate the potential behaviors and actions that your metric could drive across your tech organization to avoid unintended consequences. For instance, to maintain cost effectiveness and efficiency, number of tickets closed and time to resolution are common metrics that tech organizations track. But an emphasis on these metrics could lead to bad outcomes; tech teams are likely to rush through issues and provide superficial fixes, rather than holistic ones (which would take a longer time) that would prevent issues from happening in the first place. The result is that issues continue to linger and possibly create bigger organizational inefficiencies.

Join me at my session, “Align Tech Success With Metrics That Matter,” at Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summit APAC on October 29 in Sydney (and digitally) to:

  1. Understand how your peers are measuring tech success and the key areas of misalignment.
  2. Learn the five principles of effective measurement.
  3. Uncover how you can drive alignment to ensure tech success.