The 7 essential indicators for steering your IT estate
Seven practical KPIs every business leader should track in order to steer their IT estate effectively and make the right decisions.
Steering an IT estate without indicators is like driving without a dashboard. Here are the 7 KPIs the leader of a smaller or mid-sized company should track to stay in control of their IT.
1. IT cost to revenue ratio
This is the basic strategic indicator. It lets you place yourself against your sector and follow the trend over time.
- Benchmark: between 1 and 3% of revenue for a smaller manufacturing company, 3 to 6% for a services business, up to 8-10% in the financial sector.
- To track: quarterly, consolidating every category (hardware, licences, suppliers, telecoms, cloud).
2. Uptime (availability rate)
Measures the percentage of time during which critical services are reachable.
- A reasonable target: 99.5% for a smaller company, which is around 44 hours of downtime a year.
- Source: monitoring tools (UptimeRobot, Pingdom) or reports from your hosting supplier.
3. Average incident resolution time
The time between an incident being reported and it actually being resolved. It reflects how responsive IT support is.
- Break it down by criticality level: a blocking incident is not handled like a nice-to-have request.
- Target: under 4 hours for a critical incident, under 48 hours for a minor incident.
4. Number of incidents per month
The trend matters more than the absolute value. A steadily rising number of incidents signals an IT estate that is deteriorating.
- Cross-reference it with recent changes: a migration, a new tool, an update.
5. Backup compliance rate
The percentage of backups completed successfully over the period, and the date of the last restore test.
- Target: 100% of backups successful, with a restore test at least every six months.
6. Average age of the hardware estate
An ageing estate generates breakdowns, incompatibilities and security holes.
- Alert threshold: beyond 4 years for workstations, 5 years for servers.
- Action: plan a phased refresh rather than a mass replacement.
7. User satisfaction
An indicator that is often neglected, but revealing. A short survey (5 questions, once a year) is enough to identify the friction points.
- Key questions: perceived reliability, how fast support responds, how well the tools fit the needs of the business.
Putting it into practice
These 7 indicators fit on a single page. Ideally you consolidate them into a dashboard updated every month and presented to the executive committee. You do not need a complex tool: a shared spreadsheet does the job perfectly well to begin with.
The key is not to confuse reporting with decision-making: some IT stewardship tools aren’t really stewardship tools if they trigger no concrete action.