CIO-Weblog has a piece on measuring IT performance, including a citation of where Wall Street is going beyond the usual steps to track it’s IT quality. And oh, a comparison is made between IT and a certain fish.

Best-in-class IT organizations have gone beyond rote metrics such as system uptime and help desk problem resolution. Some IT shops on Wall Street, for example, are studying things like how many stock trades or customers they’re able to support for each IT dollar they spend, says Howard Rubin, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

But these kinds of metrics are much more difficult to use than the
traditional IT time and transaction measures. One of the big challenges that many IT leaders face in developing effective metrics, says Rubin, is determining which activities are under the auspices of the IT department. For instance, some user departments at financial services companies have their own LAN administrators who are outside the purview of the IT organization, says Rubin.

“There’s IT everywhere, not just in the IT department but in bank branches and on the plant floor,” he says. The business activity supported by IT “drifts back and forth like the eye on the head of a flounder,” he adds.

Read it all. Bon apetite.