It’s a long road to get metrics that do what IT needs and still represent real business objectives. We have to start somewhere, so I recommend getting a much stronger dialogue going between the business sponsors and the IT service implementers. And somewhere in that loop the IT management should be listening and contributing, too. In my mind, Agile is all about having those dialogues active and effective while maintaining a disciplined development and operational environment.

Very interesting perspectives. You have definitely hit on some of the key contributors to the misalignment.

This is an interesting problem, dating back to the very early days of “IT”. Remember 6-9 month (or even longer…) development and release cycles? By the time new capabilities were ready they were already out of sync with the business needs. And we weren’t even living in the age of “web speed”.

Fast forward through the years and the problem remained, but the drivers of misalignment changed. We learned that client/server and the internet/web gave us more flexibility, but it also gave us sprawl and complexity. And all those old systems now became “legacy maintenance” costs, eating into the IT budgets as you mentioned.

Now we’re in the age of cloud computing, and the situation remains basically the same. We now have layers of legacy – all that client/server and internet/web stuff is now piling on. We have more sprawl – both physical and virtual. And, as we spoke about last week, we now have “C4″ (credit card cloud computing), with the potential to cause a significant explosion in the business model. And as we all know, IT will have to fix the problem.

Moving at “web speed” is good, but as you mentioned, not being able to measure the impact of all the elements that make up your product/service supply chain creates a lot of finger pointing when things go bad, and even when they don’t in some cases. The key, and I applaud your insight on this point, is to link the value and the measurement of IT to the business drivers and success factors. While measuring cost per MIP or cost per terabyte of data stored is interesting, it provides little value in determining if IT is adding to or detracting from the performance of the lines of business. Determining which factors are important and can be linked needs to start way up front in the planning process. All too often we design a solution and then go back and try to figure out how IT impacts its performance. Rarely works.

But the real trick, and I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this, is how you instill a sense of discipline and reasonable control in defining these relationships in the age of “agile” development. Not an easy task by any means…