Benchmarking
What is Benchmarking and how does it work?
By understanding application usage within an organisation, you can modify your decision-making process to reduce Application Sprawl.
Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to best practices from other companies in the industry. Quality, time, and cost elements are measured and compared.
Benchmarking methodologies use commonly available metrics such as IT labor, hardware and software costs, numbers of devices, and FTE and calculate comparative metrics such as:
- Broad IT spend per head, and per platform
- Numbers of FTE, including different ratios for ICT staff utilisation within an organisation
- Infrastructure metrics such as the number of OS instances, and the number of desktop and laptop devices in an organisation. This includes storage metrics.
Current benchmarking focuses on readily available IT metrics and compares these to similar organisations, typically normalising for variations between different technologies, service delivery models, and skill sets.
This information may be coupled with end-user surveys to try and quantify usage and user experience, asking questions such as:
- Is the application readily available to use?
- Is the application responsive?
- Does the application meet my business needs?
While traditional benchmarking gives an indication of an application’s value to an organisation, the results are not completely evidence-based.
Why is Benchmarking important?
Merely taking available cost, FTE, and infrastructure metrics and calculating ratios does not provide for the deeper level of analysis required to understand the impact and effect of IT on your business.
Information from user surveys is based on expectations and perception; often with little factual data to substantiate the response.
The lack of transparency in benchmarking activities may not provide enough concrete evidence to pinpoint the causes of inefficiencies in your IT operation.
Introspectus Key Features
What's the solution?
Introspectus uses evidence-based data to provide for a much deeper level of analysis of your IT environment, such as:
- Time actually spent using an application (measured by keyboard and mouse activity) by region or by department and mapped over time
- Timeframes within the day (or night) when applications are used more (or less)
- Actual application load times (in seconds), by employee or location and mapped over time
- Actual employee logon times (in seconds) by location and mapped over time
- Application usage, by version
- Actual usage of Hardware (elapsed time, times most and least used and last logon details)
- Actual software installed in the environment, with version numbers, active users, and time used
Introspectus data can be combined with commonly available metrics, such as your organisation’s:
- IT labour costs
- Hardware and software costs
- Numbers of IT devices
- FTE providing and using IT services
- Service Provider costs
How does this affect my decisions?
As a decision maker within your organisation, Introspectus provides you with information to analyse:
- To what extent your organisation’s applications are used over time:
- How many people are actually using them
- When they are being used
- For how long
- How intensively
- What the actual cost of the software is per hour actually used, and not just the amount paid.
- Track changes in IT workload over time that are associated with changes in your business and ICT environments
- Which hardware and software to invest in or retire, based on actual usage trends over time
- Usage trends for an application over time
