♦  Performance Management Research

IT Staffing Benchmarks

Application development is often the largest single job category in the IT organization. But what is the ideal staffing level? This article provides benchmarks for application development staffing based on the number of users, organization size, and industry sector. In addition, we analyze application development staffing as a percentage of the total IT staff headcount. Finally, we investigate two factors that affect application development staffing: the percentage of application development and maintenance work that is outsourced and how organizations allocate capital spending to custom software versus commercial packaged applications.

The composite ratios for application developers provide the norm for all organizations taking part in our study of more than 200 IT groups. The ratio of application development staff to the total IT staff is shown in Figure 1. The data is provided for the 25th percentile, the median, and the 75th percentile. As shown, application development personnel account for 23% of the total IT staff at the median. In other words, at the mid-point of our sample, application developers account for nearly one out of every four IT staff members. The 25th percentile ratio is 14%, and the 75th percentile ratio is 32%.

from IT Staffing Ratios: Benchmarking Metrics and Analysis for 14 Key IT Functions

Measuring Marketing ROI

The environmental impacts on an MROI initiative comprise the organizational and infrastructure support and barriers within the company that affect progress in measuring MROI. The Conference Board survey covered a broad range of businesses in terms of size (measured by revenue), nature of the business (B2B, B2C, or a combination of both), and other organizational aspects.

Companies engaged primarily in B2B activity appear to be somewhat less likely to be making progress than those with a consumer component: almost half (48 percent) of B2B companies reported they were just starting or making no progress, while only 18 percent of other businesses were still at this initial stage. Similarly, only half of B2B companies had been working at MROI for longer than a year, whereas 77 percent of other companies had been doing so for more than a year.

While B2B companies tend to be more sales-driven and place less emphasis on marketing, no evidence was found suggesting a correlation between MROI, company size, business type, or other organizational characteristics. Notably, larger marketing departments were found to be no more successful in implementing ROI-driven marketing efforts than smaller ones.

from Managing and Measuring Return On Marketing Investment

Key Performance Indicators

Because KPIs are linked to objectives and strategies, there are necessarily far fewer than the sum total of all IT performance measures. Ideally, you should track between six and ten KPIs. Never try to track more than 15 KPIs on any one IT scorecard.

As strategies and objectives change, your KPIs will also change. Because of this, there needs to be a methodology behind selecting KPIs to ensure that they remain relevant and useful to the organization. The methodology must include a means to assess where the data comes from, its availability, how long it will take to collect and how often it must be collected. Finally, the methodology should assess the accuracy of the data, how often it needs to be reviewed and how it will be displayed.

Once your team has selected their candidate KPIs, they need to be scored to confirm their viability, practicality and usefulness. The initial scoring should eliminate candidates that fail for practical reasons. This is the initial assessment of your measures. After this first round of "confirming" the KPIs, your candidate list should begin to be reduced so that only those measures that will have the greatest impact remain.

from IT Performance Management: The Basics

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