IT Metrics Without Meaning Don’t Matter
Why Key Accomplishments should tell a business story—not just report a technical win
IT teams are fantastic at tracking performance. We thrive on metrics: SLAs, uptime, incident resolution times, deployment counts. And for good reason—metrics create accountability and show progress.
But here’s the catch: metrics without meaning don’t matter.
“We hit 99.9% uptime.
“We closed 93% of tickets within SLA.”
“We delivered 17 releases in 60 days.”
That’s performance. But is it progress? To business stakeholders, these accomplishments often land with a shrug. Why? Because they’re missing the one thing that makes metrics resonate: relevance.
One business leader put it bluntly:
“You keep showing me IT wins. But I don’t know how they impact what matters to me.” That’s where many IT leaders stumble. We show our work—but not its value. We report effort, but not effect.
The most influential IT leaders—those who’ve earned a seat at the strategy table—approach things differently. They don’t just showcase IT’s activities. They frame those activities in terms of business outcomes.
One CIO I worked with transformed his Business & Technology Review (BTR) format with a simple shift.
He began by reminding stakeholders:
- “Here’s what we said we’d accomplish last quarter.”
- “Here’s what we delivered—and why it mattered.”
He didn’t just show the chart. He told the story:
- How stabilizing infrastructure avoided unplanned downtime during a critical launch.
- How a new dashboard cut reporting time by 40%, freeing up sales leaders for client engagement.
- How enhanced security controls helped a product team meet regulatory deadlines with confidence.
The shift was palpable. Business leaders didn’t just nod along—they leaned in. The conversation moved from reporting to relevance. From update to insight. From IT-centric to business-aligned. That’s the power of well-framed Key Accomplishments.
They’re not just a list of things IT did. They’re a narrative that answers:
- What did we enable for the business?
- What pain did we eliminate?
- What decision, capability, or outcome did we support?
Yes, metrics are important. But they’re only influential when they’re translated into language your stakeholders understand—and care about.
This is where credibility is built.
Not just in the accuracy of your data, but in your ability to connect IT’s work to business value.
As Marc Schiller wrote in The 11 Secrets of Highly Influential IT Leaders:
“Your stakeholders don’t care about IT for IT. They care about results.”
So let’s make our accomplishments resonate.
Let’s elevate the conversation from what we did—to what we changed.
