Chapter 4 : Measuring the Success of Strategic Initiatives

Efficiency IT metric - measures the performance of the IT system itself including throughput, speed and availability.

Effectiveness IT metric - measures the impact IT has on business processes and activities including customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and sell through increase.

• Throughput - the amount of information that can travel through a system at any point.

• Transaction Speed - the amount of time a system takes to perform a transaction.

• System Availability - the number of hours a system is available for users.

• Information Accuracy - the extent to which a system generates the correct results when executing the same transaction numerous times.

• Web Traffic - includes a host of benchmarks such as the number of page views, the number of unique visitors, and the average time spent viewing a web page.

• Response Time - the time it takes to respond to user interactions such as a mouse click.

• Usability - the ease with which people perform transaction and find information. A popular usability metric on the internet is degrees of freedom, which measures the number of clicks required to find desired information.

• Customer Satisfaction - measured by such benchmarks as satisfaction surveys, percentage of existing customers retained, and increases in revenue dollars per customers. 

• Conversion Rates - the number of customer an organization "touches" for the first time and persuades to purchase its products or services. This is a popular metric for evaluating the effectiveness of banner, pop-up, and pop-under ads on the internet.

• Financial - such as return on investment (the earning power of an organization`s assets), cost-benefit analysis (the comparison of projected revenues and costs including development, maintenance, fixed and variable), and break-even analysis (the point at which constant revenues equal ongoing costs).

Customer relationship management metrics measure user satisfaction and interaction.

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