Incident Management metrics using the SAP platform

[mpodemski]

We are currently rolling out incident management based on ITIL for our SAP platform. During the implementation, we are developing metrics. I would like to know if anyone could share their IM metrics if they use SAP. I would like to have some external benchmarks. Thanks!

[rjp]

We run SAP,

I see no requirement for SAP specific metrics. Actually I don't see the requirement for any technology specific metrics in Incident Management.

Now, you may have different 'values' feeding into your metrics. For example a section of an SLA covering SAP may require incident investigation to be started within 5 minutes of detection, but another SLA covering Email may stipulate that investigation will start within 20 minutes.

In each case the metric is the same, time between detection and investigation. This is the case for all Incident Management metrics.

Some other common metrics will be percentage of incident resolved at the front line, percentage of incidents resolved within SLA commitments, mean time to resolution/repair (against the SAP services), and so on - but these will apply to all services.

What you would do is set specific targets and thresholds for SAP.

Bear in mind measurement serves a set of clearly defined objectives:

* To Direct: Set direction for activies - SLA targets for example.
* To Intervene: To identify events where decisions and actions are required by specific circumstances
* To Justify: To provide object reasons for a future course of action
* To Validate: To assess and evaluate previous actions, decisions and outcomes.

So on intervention - using your measurements (time based) to identify when an incident response target in an SLA was breeched. You would have a specific value for SAP. But this is dependent on a number of factors very sepcific to each situation.

One obvious one is business 'criticality' which is a combination of risk, cost, productivity, and other factors like agreed service times, projected availability, etc.

So if for some bizzare reasons you were only running SAP asset management then disruptions to it aren't going to be as costly, and impact productivity as much as if your are running the financials and the business can't process payments or raise invoices.

You should get your measurements clear, what you can and will measure, and how you will use those measurements. Then you should sit down with the business process owners, or whatever you call them, and negotiate what levels you are going to set on those measurements, as controlled events for directing actions and resources. This will be a balance between what the business wants and what you have the resources to deliver.