ADP CIO implements outcome-driven analytics

As CIOs seek to make sure the numbers they review are the numbers that matter, one company has taken an innovative approach to analytics by focusing on building an outcome-driven IT organization. Instead of focusing on traditional IT metrics, ADP has shifted to measuring its 8,000-person IT organization based on business metrics.

With more than $11 billion in revenues, ADP is one of the world's largest providers of business outsourcing and human capital management solutions and was an early provider of cloud services. In an article in the Huffington Post, ADP CIO Mike Capone — who is also responsible for product development for ADP—says that CIOs today who measure their worth based on their IT budget are already dead because today CIOs are getting measured on business outcomes, and he outlines four steps CIOs can take to create outcome-focused IT organizations.

1. The first step is to flatten the organization to improve execution velocity, and Capone eliminated layers of management. He also makes sure that that senior IT executives spend 20 percent of their time with customers, and he’s changed IT incentives that were tied to uptime and budgets so that they’re now based on business metrics, such as revenue growth, profitability and reductions in the number of service center calls.
2. ADP’s second step is to focus on delighting customers, and IT has leveraged cloud resources to respond to consumerism and support mobile access to services.
3. The next step he outlines is to develop a team-oriented bias toward results, and ADP has developed a culture within IT of collaborating with users of IT to create effective business outcomes. Capone points out that analytics and big data play an important part in driving collaboration and measuring results.
4. ADP’s final step is to develop a strategy guided by peer collaboration. As CIO, Capone says he spends 80 percent of his day working on strategy and collaborating with other senior executives, and the balance on managing technology.

Do you think outcome-driven analytics matter, and should CIOs consider shifting toward measuring IT based on business outcomes instead of traditional IT metrics?

Read, "Why IT fumbles analytics."

Chris Carroll is a freelance technology writer with over 30 years editorial experience. See more information about his background, including samples of his work and references, at www.chriscarroll.com.