IT Infrastructure LOB issues first metrics

The Information Technology Infrastructure Line of Business consolidation effort recently issued the first set of metrics for desktop systems and support and asked agencies to submit a five-year implementation plan for all metrics by March. Von Harrison, ITI LOB program manager, said Nov. 15 that the desktop metrics are the first of three sets under the initiative, and she expects the other two collections of measures — for mainframes and servers and for telecommunications systems and support — to be done by September 2008. “We published three service-level and three cost-efficiency measures in August,” Harrison said after a presentation on federal consolidation initiatives in Bethesda, Md., sponsored by the Bethesda chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. “The goal is for agencies to improve their service levels and lower their costs across the three areas of the LOB.” Harrison said she could not provide the specific metrics because they are considered proprietary information. GSA awarded Gartner a $22 million contract in June to develop the metrics for all three areas. The Office of Management and Budget found that agencies spend about $22 billion a year on desktop computers, telecom and data centers, and there is no governmentwide standard for these initiatives. OMB also found that governmentwide infrastructure costs cannot be easily calculated. The first set of metrics – for desktop systems and support — that Gartner developed are: • Total cost per device. • Total cost per user. • Cost per help-desk contact. • Mission-critical service restoration percentage. • Help-desk speed-of-answer percentage. • Help-desk first-contact resolution percentage. For the mainframe and servers area, Gartner will develop metrics around: • Mainframe cost per millions of instructions per second.• Mainframe availability percentage. • Wintel cost per server. • Wintel server availability percentage. • Unix cost per server. • Unix server availability percentage. For telecommunications services and support, Gartner will look at: • Wide-area data network cost per device. • Wide-area data network availability percentage. • Local-area network cost per active port. • Local-area network availability percentage. • Long-distance telephony cost per minute. • Local telephony cost per extension. • Videoconference cost per minute. Harrison added that the ITI LOB program office will develop an optimization guide and resource library in the next year. Some of the information will be available publicly and some only to federal agencies. The optimization guide is scheduled to be finished by January, she said. “We will provide lessons learned, model service-level agreement templates and best practices,” Harrison said. "Agencies will begin to change IT management based on the LOB metrics."She warned that some agencies may have a harder time complying with these baseline metrics because their existing contracts are not set up to measure these areas. Harrison said agencies in this situation will have to modify their  contracts.