Lumos Analytics - How You Can Align IT with Business Strategy
Lumos Analytics is IT’s executive dashboard to aid you in monitoring key KPIs, maintaining tight alignment with the business and quantifying the impact of your initiatives.
Company-Wide Goals Powered By IT
IT’s mission is to unlock a company’s full potential through technology. If done well, IT becomes a business catalyst that lets every team move a bit faster. However, there is a risk due to the large surface area. Many IT leaders tell me that they feel spread thin because they need to support many different teams with many different needs. From managing software spend with finance to eliminating excessive admin access with security to handling a flood of IT tickets to enable end users, it’s a lot.
This article will explain how you can align IT goals with the overall business strategy to be more impactful. And, you’ll learn more about why we are launching Lumos Analytics today. Lumos Analytics is IT’s executive dashboard to aid you in monitoring key KPIs, maintaining tight alignment with the business and quantifying the impact of your initiatives. Let’s dive in.
The Importance of a Northstar Question
Given that IT has such huge scope, focus is key. This reminds me of the British Rowing Team at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The Great Britain Men’s Eights used to be mediocre and regularly placed 6th. Within 24 months, the team transformed from an average squad that hasn’t won a gold medal since 1912 to winning the Summer Olympics. How did they do it? Focus.
They asked themselves one simple question every day: Will it make the boat go faster? “Should I do this workout for 70 mins?” Will it make the boat go faster? “Should we go to the pub tonight?” Will it make the boat go faster? “Should we have eggs for breakfast?” Will it make the boat go faster? This one question gave them immense clarity to achieve the unachievable.
The best way to turn the odds in your favor is through clarity and focus. So, what is your version of “Will it make the boat go faster?” To figure out what that question might be, IT first needs to look at what the business is actually trying to achieve.
A Framework for Maximum IT Impact
Even though IT is supporting many different teams with seemingly different goals, they all feed into the same top-level concerns. They are concerned about revenue, operational efficiency, risk and cost. Similar to a ship that needs a destination to use the wind effectively, IT must align with those top-level company goals for true impact.
Assuming IT goals map to business outcomes, executing them can still be tough. You need to be able to track whether you are actually making the boat faster. However, IT often deals with scattered data across IT ticketing, SSO providers, invoicing systems, HR solutions, and more, making it hard to find clear answers. A unified IT dashboard is crucial. It shows leadership how IT affects business and helps IT measure progress.
So, to be a true catalyst for the company, you
- need to first understand the business goals,
- form IT goals that map to those business outcomes, and
- create a source of truth to measure those goals continuously.
Answer Your “Will it Make the Boat Go Faster” Question
After talking with 100 IT leaders over the past year, a common gap emerged: a source of truth for reporting (see requirement three from the list above). IT lacks a reliable way to measure and track IT goals and their business impact. The result is that IT is often seen as a necessary cost center rather than a catalyst since IT struggles to communicate how they help the company move faster.
To change that, we are launching Lumos Analytics today. By unifying vendor, app, and access data from various systems into one platform, Lumos Analytics enables you to answer a diverse set of questions about, say, your software spend or ticket time-to-resolution. Here are three case studies of how this can enable you to be more successful.
Company Goal #1: Profitability
Imagine your company aims for profitability this year. A key step is cutting IT costs, particularly software spend. Up to 30% of software spend is unnecessarily spent because of unused licenses, shadow IT or overpriced contracts. Lumos Analytics consolidates your spending, licensing, and usage data in one place, empowering you and your finance team to analyze and reduce unnecessary software expenses effectively. By identifying teams with high software spending or apps with unused licenses, you can target and reduce excess costs efficiently.
Company Goal #2: Operational Efficiency
Suppose your organization's goal is to become more efficient. IT can drive this by automating employee support. We’ve seen that the average time-to-resolution for tickets is 18 to 28 hours, slowing the business down significantly. Lumos Analytics monitors crucial IT operation metrics, such as the volume of monthly access requests and resolution times. This data helps identify and address bottlenecks, enabling you to streamline approval processes and improve SLAs.
Company Goal #3: Risk Reduction
Consider your company's plan to expand into European markets, requiring ISO 27001 compliance. Everyone who has gone through an ISO certification knows that it takes months of preparation to get ready. IT and security teams can collaborate to streamline access controls and ease the compliance process. Lumos Analytics ensures you stay on top of access control policies, helping to quickly spot and resolve issues like active access of terminated users or incomplete access reviews, thereby mitigating risks and supporting expansion efforts.
Assess Your Status Quo with Lumos Analytics
This article is a reminder of how important it is to establish a clear IT direction aligned with business priorities. That’s why we launched Lumos Analytics. It enables you to track and measure your IT efforts against your IT-specific 'will it make the boat move faster' question through a unified dashboard. This helps you focus, achieve more impact, and communicate success to leadership.
So, now what? To kick off our product launch, you can assess how well you're meeting standard IT KPIs. Even if you are not a paid Lumos customer, you can make use of Lumos Analytics for free! Request a demo here and we'll give you actionable insights at no cost.
We’ll connect your IT ticketing system to Lumos and integrate six apps for analysis like Salesforce, Zoom, Adobe and many more. Our sophisticated AI will promptly examine the data and highlight areas for cost, security, and operational improvements. Here are a few real-life success stories:
- Profitability: Lumos Analytics identified 450 unused E5 Licenses for Microsoft, allowing an IT Director to save $200,000.
- Operational Efficiency: Another IT Leader ran an analysis, revealing that nearly half of all IT tickets were software access requests with an average time-to-resolution of 26 hours. She used that data as a benchmark for her 2024 goals.
- Risk Reduction: A CISO ran Lumos over all of his sensitive applications and identified 650 idle admin accounts in AWS, leading to audit savings of $150,000.
We are committed to helping you find problems that they may not even know they have.
Let’s see how we can make the boat move faster. Sign up for a free analysis here.