Our systems detected an issue with your IP. If you think this is an error please submit your concerns via our contact form.

Cio icon

Key Metrics for Every CIO

The top six metrics for CIOs – and they have very little to do with IT.

  • As a CIO, you are inundated with data and information about how your IT organization is performing based on the various IT metrics that exist.
  • The information we receive from metrics is often just that – information. Rarely is it used as a tool to drive the organization forward.
  • CIO metrics need to consider the goals of key stakeholders in the organization.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • The top metrics for CIOs don’t have anything to do with IT.
  • CIOs should measure and monitor metrics that have a direct impact on the business.
  • Be intentional with the metric and number of metrics that you monitor on a regular basis.
  • Be transparent with your stakeholders on what and why you are measuring those specific metrics.

Impact and Result

  • Measure fewer metrics, but measure those that will have a significant impact on how your deliver value to your organization.
  • Focus on the metrics that you can take action against, rather than simply monitor.
  • Ensure your metrics tie to your top priorities as a CIO.

Key Metrics for Every CIO Research & Tools

1. Key Metrics for Every CIO deck – The top metrics every CIO should measure and act on

Leverage the top metrics for every CIO to help focus your attention and provide insight into actionable steps.

This short research piece highlights the top metrics for every CIO, how those align to your CIO priorities, and action steps against those metrics.


Key Metrics for Every CIO

The top six metrics for CIOs – and they have very little to do with IT

Analyst Perspective

Measure with intention

Be the strategic CIO who monitors the right metrics relevant to their priorities – regardless of industry or organization. When CIOs provide a laundry list of metrics they are consistently measuring and monitoring, it demonstrates a few things.

First, they are probably measuring more metrics than they truly care about or could action. These “standardized” metrics become something measured out of expectation, not intention; therefore, they lose their meaning and value to you as a CIO. Stop spending time on these metrics you will be unable or unwilling to address.

Secondly, it indicates a lack of trust in the IT leadership team, who can and should be monitoring these commonplace operational measures. An empowered IT leader will understand the responsibility they have to inform the CIO should a metric be derailing from the desired outcome.

Photo of Brittany Lutes, Senior Research Analyst, Organizational Transformation Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Brittany Lutes
Senior Research Analyst
Organizational Transformation Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

CIOs need to measure a set of specific metrics that:

  • Will support the organization’s vision, their career, and the IT function all in one.
  • Can be used as a tool to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions that will improve the IT function’s ability to deliver value.
  • Consider the influence of critical stakeholders, especially the end customer.
  • Are easily measured at any point in time.
Common Obstacles

CIOs often cannot define these metrics because:

  • We confuse the operational metrics IT leaders need to monitor with strategic metrics CIOs need to monitor.
  • Previously monitored metrics did not deliver value.
  • It is hard to decide on a metric that will prove both insightful and easily measurable.
  • We measure metrics without any method or insight on how to take actionable steps forward.
Info-Tech’s Approach

For every CIO, there are six areas that should be a focus, no matter your organization or industry. These six priorities will inform the metrics worth measuring:

  • Risk management
  • Delivering on business objectives
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Employee engagement
  • Business leadership relations
  • Managing to a budget

Info-Tech Insight

The top metrics for a CIO to measure and monitor have very little to do with IT and everything to do with ensuring the success of the business.

Your challenge

CIOs are not using metrics as a personal tool to advance the organization:
  • Metrics should be used as a tool by the CIO to help inform the future actions that will be taken to reach the organization’s strategic vision.
  • As a CIO, you need to have a defined set of metrics that will support your career, the organization, and the IT function you are accountable for.
  • CIO metrics must consider the most important stakeholders across the entire ecosystem of the organization – especially the end customer.
  • The metrics for a CIO are distinctly different from the metrics you use to measure the operational effectiveness of the different IT functions.
“CIOs are businesspeople first and technology people second.” (Myles Suer, Source: CIO, 2019.)

Common obstacles

These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many CIOs:
  • CIOs often do not measure metrics because they are not aware of what should or needs to be measured.
  • As a result of not wanting to measure the wrong thing, CIOs can often choose to measure nothing at all.
  • Or they get too focused on the operational metrics of their IT organization, leaving the strategic business metrics forgotten.
  • Moreover, narrowing the number of metrics that are being measured down to an actionable number is very difficult.
  • We rely only on physical data sets to help inform the measurements, not considering the qualitative feedback received.
CIO priorities are business priorities

46% of CIOs are transforming operations, focused on customer experiences and employee productivity. (Source: Foundry, 2022.)

Finances (41.3%) and customers (28.1%) remain the top two focuses for CIOs when measuring IT effectiveness. All other focuses combine for the remaining 30.6%. (Source: Journal of Informational Technology Management, 2018.)

Info-Tech’s approach

Organizational goals inform CIO metrics

Diagram with 'CIO Metrics' at the center surrounded by 'Directive Goals', 'Product/Service Goals', 'IT Goals', and 'Operations Goals', each of which are connected to eachother by 'Customers'.

The Info-Tech difference:
  1. Every CIO has the same set of priorities regardless of their organization or industry given that these metrics are influenced by similar goals of organizations.
  2. CIO metrics are a tool to help inform the actions that will support each core area in reaching their desired goals.
  3. Be mindful of the goals different business units are using to reach the organization’s strategic vision – this includes your own IT goals.
  4. Directly or indirectly, you will always influence the ability to acquire and retain customers for the organization.

CIO priorities

MANAGING TO A BUDGET
Reducing operational costs and increasing strategic IT spend.
Table centerpiece for CIO Priorities. DELIVERING ON BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
Aligning IT initiatives to the vision of the organization.
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Directly and indirectly impacting customer experience.
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Creating an IT workforce of engaged and purpose-driven people.
RISK MANAGEMENT
Actively knowing and mitigating threats to the organization.
BUSINESS LEADERSHIP RELATIONS
Establishing a network of influential business leaders.

High-level process flow

How do we use the CIO metrics?
Process flow that starts at 'Consider - Identify and analyze CIO priorities', and is followed by 'Select priorities - Identify the top priorities for CIOs (see previous slide)', 'Create a measure - Determine a measure that aligns to each priority', 'Make changes & improvements - Take action to improve the measure and reach the goal you are trying to achieve', 'Demonstrate progress - Use the metrics to demonstrate progress against priorities'. Using priority-based metrics allows you to make incremental improvements that can be measured and reported on, which makes program maturation a natural process.

Example CIO dashboard

Example CIO dashboard.
* Arrow indicates month-over-month trend

Harness the value of metric data

Metrics are rarely used accurately as a tool
  • When you have good metrics, you can:
    • Ensure employees are focused on the priorities of the organization
    • Have insight to make better decisions
    • Communicate with the business using language that resonates with each stakeholder
    • Increase the performance of your IT function
    • Continually adapt to meet changing business demands
  • Metrics are tools that quantifiably indicate whether a goal is on track to being achieved (proactive) or if the goal was successfully achieved (retroactive)
  • This is often reflected through two metric types:
    • Leading Metrics: The metric indicates if there are actions that should be taken in the process of achieving a desired outcome.
    • Lagging Metrics: Based on the desired outcome, the metric can indicate where there were successes or failures that supported or prevented the outcome from being achieved.
  • Use the data from the metrics to inform your actions. Do not collect this data if your intent is simply to know the data point. You must be willing to act.
"The way to make a metric successful is by understanding why you are measuring it." (Jeff Neyland CIO)

CIOs measure strategic business metrics

Keep the IT leadership accountable for operational metrics
  • Leveraging the IT leadership team, empower and hold each leader accountable for the operational metrics specific to their functional area
  • As a CIO, focus on the metrics that are going to impact the business. These are often tied to people or stakeholders:
    • The customers who will purchase the product or service
    • The decision makers who will fund IT initiatives
    • The champions of IT value
    • The IT employees who will be driven to succeed
    • The owner of an IT risk event
  • By focusing on these priority areas, you can regularly monitor aspects that will have major business impacts – and be able to address those impacts.
As a CIO, avoid spending time on operational metrics such as:
  • Time to deliver
  • Time to resolve
  • Project delivery (scope, time, money)
  • Application usage
  • User experiences
  • SLAs
  • Uptime/downtime
  • Resource costs
  • Ticket resolution
  • Number of phishing attempts
Info-Tech Insight

While operational metrics are important to your organization, IT leaders should be empowered and responsible for their management.

SECTION 1

Actively Managing IT Risks

Actively manage IT risks

The impact of IT risks to your organization cannot be ignored any further
  • Few individuals in an organization understand IT risks and can proactively plan for the prevention of those threats, making the CIO the responsible and accountable individual when it comes to IT risks – especially the components that tie into cybersecurity.
  • When the negative impacts of an IT threat event are translated into terms that can be understood and actioned by all in the organization, it increases the likelihood of receiving the sponsorship and funding support necessary.
  • Moreover, risk management can be used as a tool to drive the organization toward its vision state, enabling informed risk decisions.

Risk management metric:

Number of critical IT threats that were detected and prevented before impact to the organization.

Beyond risk prevention
Organizations that have a clear risk tolerance can use their risk assessments to better inform their decisions.
Specifically, taking risks that could lead to a high return on investment or other key organizational drivers.

Protect the organization from more than just cyber threats

Other risk-related metrics:
  • Percentage of IT risks integrated into the organization’s risk management approach.
  • Number of risk management incidents that were not identified by your organization (and the potential financial impact of those risks).
  • Business satisfaction with IT actions to reduce impact of negative IT risk events.
  • Number of redundant systems removed from the organizations portfolio.
Action steps to take:
  • Create a risk-aware culture, not just with IT folks. The entire organization needs to understand how IT risks are preventable.
  • Clearly demonstrate the financial and reputational impact of potential IT risks and ensure that this is communicated with decision-makers in the organization.
  • Have a single source of truth to document possible risk events and report prevention tactics to minimize the impact of risks.
  • Use this information to recommend budget changes and help make risk-informed decisions.

49%

Investing in Risk

Heads of IT “cited increasing cybersecurity protections as the top business initiative driving IT investments this year” (Source: Foundry, 2022.)

SECTION 2

Delivering on Business Objectives

Delivering on business objectives

Deliver on initiatives that bring value to your organization and stop benchmarking
  • CIOs often want to know how they are performing in comparison to their competitors (aka where do you compare in the benchmarking?)
  • While this is a nice to know, it adds zero value in demonstrating that you understand your business, let alone the goals of your business
  • Every organization will have a different set of goals it is striving toward, despite being in the same industry, sector, or market.
  • Measuring your performance against the objectives of the organization prevents CIOs from being more technical than it would do them good.

Business Objective Alignment Metric:

Percentage of IT metrics have a direct line of impact to the business goals

Stop using benchmarks to validate yourself against other organizations. Benchmarking does not provide:
  • Insight into how well that organization performed against their goals.
  • That other organizations goals are likely very different from your own organization's goals.
  • It often aggregates the scores so much; good and bad performers stop being clearly identified.

Provide a clear line of sight from IT metrics to business goals

Other business alignment metrics:
  • Number of IT initiatives that have a significant impact on the success of the organization's goals.
  • Number of IT initiatives that exceed the expected value.
  • Positive impact ($) of IT initiatives on driving business innovation.
Action steps to take:
  • Establish a library or dashboard of all the metrics you are currently measuring as an IT organization, and align each of them to one or more of the business objectives your organization has.
  • Leverage the members of the organization’s executive team to validate they understand how your metric ties to the business objective.
  • Any metric that does not have a clear line of sight should be reconsidered.
  • IT metrics should continue to speak in business terms, not IT terms.

50%

CIOs drive the business

The percentage of CEOs that recognize the CIO as the main driver of the business strategy in the next 2-3 years. (Source: Deloitte, 2020.)

SECTION 3

Impact on Customer Satisfaction

Influencing end-customer satisfaction

Directly or indirectly, IT influences how satisfied the customer is with their product or service
  • Now more than ever before, IT can positively influence the end-customer’s satisfaction with the product or service they purchase.
  • From operational redundancies to the customer’s interaction with the organization, IT can and should be positively impacting the customer experience.
  • IT leaders who take an interest in the customer demonstrate that they are business-focused individuals and understand the intention of what the organization is seeking to achieve.
  • With the CIO role becoming a strategic one, understanding why a customer would or would not purchase your organization’s product or service stops being a “nice to have.”

Customer satisfaction metric:

What is the positive impact ($ or %) of IT initiatives on customer satisfaction?

Info-Tech Insight

Be the one to suggest new IT initiatives that will impact the customer experience – stop waiting for other business leaders to make the recommendation.

Enhance the end-customer experience with I&T

Other customer satisfaction metrics:
  • Amount of time CIO spends interacting directly with customers.
  • Customer retention rate.
  • Customer attraction rate.
Action steps to take:
  • Identify the core IT capabilities that support customer experience. Automation? Mobile application? Personal information secured?
  • Suggest an IT-supported or-led initiative that will enhance the customer experience and meet the business goals. Retention? Acquisition? Growth in spend?
  • This is where operational metrics or dashboards can have a real influence on the customer experience. Be mindful of how IT impacts the customer journey.

41%

Direct CX interaction

In 2022, 41% of IT heads were directly interacting with the end customer. (Source: Foundry, 2022.)

Key Metrics for Every CIO preview picture

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Talk to an Analyst

Our analyst calls are focused on helping our members use the research we produce, and our experts will guide you to successful project completion.

Book an Analyst Call on This Topic

You can start as early as tomorrow morning. Our analysts will explain the process during your first call.

Get Advice From a Subject Matter Expert

Each call will focus on explaining the material and helping you to plan your project, interpret and analyze the results of each project step, and set the direction for your next project step.

Unlock Sample Research

Author

Brittany Lutes

Contributors

  • Jeff Neyland, CIO – University of Texas at Arlington
  • Brett Trelfa – SVP and CIO – Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield
  • Vicki Van Alphan – Executive Counsellor – Info-Tech Research Group
  • Mary van Leer – Executive Counsellor – Info-Tech Research Group
  • Jack Hakimian – Vice President Research – Info-Tech Research Group
  • Mike Tweedie – CIO Practice Lead – Info-Tech Research Group
  • Ibrahim Abdel-Kader – Research Analyst – Info-Tech Research Group
  • Graham Price – Executive Counsellor – Info-Tech Research Group
  • Valence Howden – Principal Research Director – Info-Tech Research Group
  • Tony Denford – CIO Practice Lead – Info-Tech Research Group
Visit our Exponential IT Research Center
Over 100 analysts waiting to take your call right now: 1-519-432-3550 x2019