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Roger Heller In the 1990's many traditional computing organizations are being asked to justify their existence against emerging technologies and departmental solutions. The underlying question is which technological platforms provide the highest, most reliable functionality for the lowest costs. One of the several components that should be analyzed prior to making technical decisions are the costs associated with technologies being considered and what benefits an organization recognizes from the investment. For example, some organizations that have ventured into the world of client server are beginning to realize that it isn't the panacea that it was originally intended to be. It is generally agreed that the development functionality and productivity improvements are high. However, there are a number of hidden costs that have to be recognized and accounted for in this environment. One of the largest obstacles an organization must overcome when choosing a technology is understanding the impact it will have on both the application development organization as well as production services. A Historical Perspective Information Technology organizations have had the ability to measure focused aspects of a computing organization using both proprietary and industry accepted standards for several years. Data Center productivity studies have existed since the early 1980's. Similarly, various consulting firms provide the ability to evaluate the application portfolio and its support of the business. Unfortunately, neither of the approaches address the linkages between the application portfolio and it's underlying technical infrastructure. This article describes the base metrics required to build the linkage between the two technical areas and presents concepts on how these measures are used. Future articles will describe specific analysis techniques and uses of the analysis. The analysis is built on five distinct groupings of data that provide the base metrics: Function Points Function Points provide the metric for evaluating the functionality provided to the end user through the application portfolio. Since the metric is repeatable and transferable between platforms it allows us to compare applications across a broad range of disparate operating technologies. Using this information we can answer questions related to application size, cost and functionality between platforms. Staffing Profile A comprehensive profile of staffing for both developers and production support provides the basis for productivity analysis. The profile includes all staff that either develops or maintains applications, as well as those that operate or maintain the equipment. By including the staff that supports centralized and departmental implementations, we are able to build a complete representation of the headcount required to support corporate computing. Production Services Profile This profile considers all locations where computing is supplied and/or maintained. All technology components of the computing infrastructure are accounted for in the profile. Common capacity and application utilization information of the equipment are captured for each environment. This provides the primary link between production services and the application portfolio. This linkage is used to compare operations, throughput and productivity statistics for the environments. Application/Project Performance The Application/Project profile provides the view into the appli-cations development environment. The profile is built by collecting statistics and project characteristics. The data collected allows us to analyze productivity measurements by project, technology and development environment. Technology Chart of Accounts Financial information is the key to the comparative analysis. This component allows us to analyze the financial impact the various technical platforms have on an organization, and compare it to the functionality and productivity measures. This information helps to formulate a strategy that is financially sound and justifiable. The Chart of Accounts is designed to collect specific information on how a business allocates its computing budget both within the data center and for departmental computing solutions. The results provide a key component of a strategy that can easily be communicated to both technical and non-technical audiences. Bringing the Base Metrics Together Using the base metrics, we are able to formulate answers to questions that help organizations make critical technical decisions. The questions include:
About the author Roger Heller, Vice President, Q/P Management Group, Inc, wrote this article. © Copyright, 2000-2002. Q/P Management Group, Inc. Proprietary and Confidential. All Rights Reserved. |
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