I actually wanted to write a post on a regional CIO gathering organized by Gartner Associates on “Key Performance Indicators” (KPI) which was very interesting, but not much there to report. There are some really interesting ideas on how different CIOs measure the collective performances of their own organizations. Steve Laster, the CIO at Harvard Business School, gave some examples, some of the usual uptime stats for standard services such as email. However, a few other examples he provided were intriguing – time tracking by staff and “number of angry calls to the CIO per week”.

In the end, the question that was posed to the attendees by Laura Craft, who moderated the discussion, was “Can you think of IT metrics at the institutional level?” In other words, what are the KPIs for the institution itself and amongst them, which are IT related. This did not result in anything that I found useful, but there were some wild ideas. I told the attendees my experience at Pace, where KPIs were big. There the institutional KPIs were simply “# of admitted students by school, Yield, Financial Aid offered, Net Revenue”. Whereas IT plays an indirect support role in all these areas, none of these are affected by IT performance directly.

We in Library and Technology Services (LTS, the new IS) are continuing to work hard on many different projects and I would like to talk about some of these.

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