{"id":157,"date":"2006-10-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/2006\/10\/23\/techniques-for-measuring-its-effectiveness\/"},"modified":"2021-12-30T11:36:37","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T11:36:37","slug":"techniques-for-measuring-its-effectiveness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/2006\/10\/23\/techniques-for-measuring-its-effectiveness\/","title":{"rendered":"Techniques For Measuring IT&#8217;s Effectiveness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Failed customer interactions, and those at risk of failure, represent a key opportunity for companies to improve the processes that matter most.  American Power Conversion takes note every time a customer interaction doesn&#8217;t hit the mark&#8211;say, when a product doesn&#8217;t ship on time.  APC considers that information even more valuable than its CRM success rate.  The company has created an alert system to notify the appropriate employees when a customer engagement is at risk of failing, giving APC a chance to take corrective action and minimize those failures. [<i>Website note:  This is applicable to measuring security effectiveness as well.<\/i>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Nadeau, director of CRM, explains that APC&#8217;s culture is geared toward avoiding failure because its business is selling uninterruptible power supplies.  Uninterruptible customer satisfaction&#8211;that&#8217;s a business every company should be in.  <\/p>\n<p>You know customer impact is critical to your company&#8217;s strategy, but how do you get there?  Force the IT department to take on high-impact projects.  Vanguard plots each IT project in one of nine boxes on a grid, with low, medium, and high ratings for client impact and operational impact, meaning increased revenue or lower cost.<\/p>\n<p>Heller sets a goal for what percentage of spending falls in each box and gets a warning on his dashboard if he&#8217;s not spending on projects with high client impact.<\/p>\n<p>Knowing that, CIO Catherine Boivie can make a business case to expand the e-claims system by comparing the costs for a system upgrade with the personnel costs for handling claims manually.<\/p>\n<p>EMC wanted to see what effect near-shore contractors would have on an internal project to deploy Automatic Data Processing&#8217;s general ledger applications at the company&#8217;s offices in Brazil.  &#8220;The knowledge of local needs, challenges, obstacles are key to the overall success of territory-specific projects,&#8221; he says.  The lessons learned there are helping determine the mix of in-house and outsourced staffers for other IT initiatives.<\/p>\n<p>Avnet business unit and IT managers jointly prioritize IT projects based on how quickly they can save money or deliver value to the company.<\/p>\n<p>Stuart Madnick, a professor of IT at MIT&#8217;s Sloan School of Management, and associates are developing a methodology that compares IT security measures taken by an organization and the perception that employees and managers have of the current state of security.  One survey showed a gap of 0.78 on people&#8217;s awareness of good security practices and a gap of 1.08 on whether they followed those practices.<\/p>\n<p>Before implementing CMMI, the interface development team&#8217;s performance in meeting the model&#8217;s best practices was inconsistent.   This is a critical issue for Vanguard Group, since the mutual fund company does about 80% of its interactions over the Web.  So when it adds a feature, Vanguard tracks how many people start using the feature, how many get through the process, and how many drop out and where.<\/p>\n<p>At Global Crossing, IT staff now accompany salespeople when meeting with customers and prospects.  The rationale is that no one is better prepared to explain the company&#8217;s IP-based services than the IT experts who are responsible for managing its network.  And CIO Dan Wagner isn&#8217;t making this some high-minded, fuzzy goal.  The tally after the first three quarters of the year: Developers have attended 175 sales calls; operations people, 125 sales calls; and security staffers, 75 sales calls.  Global Crossing CIO Wagner calls the new stuff &#8220;strategic software development&#8221;; Hewlett-Packard CIO Randy Mott refers to it as innovation.<\/p>\n<p>http:\/\/www.informationweek.com\/shared\/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=193401034<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2644,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions\/2644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}