Data Driven Diary
Metrics Blog
The focus here is on costs and benefits, trends and drivers, best practices and worst cases in enterprise IT: our consultants report on their day-to-day business and show how IT organisations today can set themselves up to be high-performance and future-proof. Their tools: comparative data from our data lake and experience from over 4,000 strategic projects.
Market & Sourcing
IT mediation and arbitration for managed services
IT mediation, conciliation or an arbitration report can help to mend a broken relationship between customers and IT providers - or make the separation and transition cleaner. We show areas where the partnership is put to the test in advance.
Cut Waste with Strategic Application Rationalisation
Across enterprise IT landscapes, bloated application portfolios are a silent cost driver. Overlapping systems, legacy tools, and underused platforms not only inflate spend - they slow transformation. Rationalising your application estate isn’t just a cost-cutting exercise. It’s a strategic reset.
Market & Sourcing
IT Sourcing Transition: from Scope to Success
The transition and transformation (T&T) in IT sourcing - the change of an IT provider - won't run smoothly if the T&T project plan does not cover all tasks and scopes estimates are incorrectly. Three aspects of a T&T plan show how customers and providers should proceed effectively.
Market & Sourcing
IT Outsourcing: Five Mistakes in Contract Negotiations
Outsourcing IT services can unlock efficiency, reduce operational burden, and bring specialist expertise into your organisation. But too often, the real cost of a sourcing agreement only becomes clear after the ink under the sourcing contract has dried.
Excellence & Organization
Application Portfolio Management: How to Cut Software Waste
What if your software costs aren’t too high - they’re just unmanaged? Complexity creeps into IT environments unnoticed, through redundancies or superfluous modules. With Application Portfolio Management (APM), CIOs can reduce waste, gain control, and align IT with business.
Market & Sourcing
IT Sourcing Strategy: Less Risk, More Results
In 2025, CIOs are under pressure to deliver greater agility, smarter cost control, and stronger vendor performance - often all at once. But without a clear IT sourcing strategy that aligns business goals with IT execution, many end up with cost blowouts, rigid contracts, and limited flexibility.
Market & Sourcing
Reducing risks from vendor lock-in
Following the akquisition of VMware by Broadcom, customers were confronted with new pricing and licence models. A quick change of supplier was usually not possible due to vendor lock-in. How can companies arm themselves against price increases from key vendors?
Market & Sourcing
Provider failure - critical risks in IT sourcing
Most large organisations have plans in place to compensate for a data centre fire and ensure continuity of IT supply, but what happens if a strategic IT provider is hit by economic turbulence? Here too, IT organisations need to be prepared.
Market & Sourcing
Transition - starts earlier than you think
The Transition Mode of Operation (TMO) is a critical operational phase in IT sourcing. Unfortunately, the shift from one IT service provider to another is still too rarely successful in practice. What can be done about this?
Market & Sourcing
Best Practices 2: Day rates for consultants
Day rates for IT consultants continue to rise. But companies can contain costs in a sensible way: for example, through T&M instead of lump sums, supplier consolidation and systematic skill prioritisation.
Market & Sourcing
Best Practices: Day rates for consultants
Day rates for IT consultants have risen sharply in recent years. But how can companies contain costs in a meaningful way? Best practices are long-term agreements, fixed purchase quantities and on-the-job training.
Market & Sourcing
IT Vendor Tiering - ABC is not enough
When evaluating IT suppliers - vendor tiering as part of vendor management - the focus is usually on spend. However, expensive commodity software has only limited strategic value. Tools and capabilities of partners who can take an organisation into the future are more important.
Methods & Tools
TBM - Showing cost and value of applications
The application portfolio is somewhat of a black box - necessary, opaque and expensive. With the TBM framework, application managers can strengthen their position by demonstrating the potential of digital tools. But what is TBM and what are its benefits?
Costs & Benefits
IT Budget and IT Costs: Forecast 2025
IT cost-optimisation measures will shape the year 2025, and IT budgets will only grow slightly. This will force IT management to put services to the test. Only budgets for IT security show further double-digit growth.
Excellence & Organization
IT service level: Less is more (sometimes)
Hard times for gold and platinum: IT service levels below bronze are becoming more popular. This move can save money, but more importantly it changes the customer relationship. What should IT managers be aware of?
Security Operations Center (SOC): better outsourced
IT security between cost and expertise: the example of Security Operations Centres (SOC) shows that outsourcing is a viable option. Good planning and proper preparation of the sourcing project are essential.
Methods & Tools
KPIs: How to optimise DevOps Performance
There are often shortcomings in the way organisations implement DevOps. Because KPIs are not applied or are used incorrectly, DevOps cannot be managed in a meaningful way. But it pays to improve - financially, in terms of speed and team spirit.
Methods & Tools
How to measure IT user satisfaction
Conventional, in-depth surveys of IT user satisfaction often return average values and take a long time to conduct. They need to be supplemented with short, quick analyses.
Methods & Tools
IT benchmarks: better integration of IT and business
IT benchmarks based on prices or costs are powerful tools in digital ecosystems. This is because performance comparisons help to increase the efficiency and profitability of an organisation. But benchmarks also offer many other starting points for optimising your own IT.
Methods & Tools
Efficient billing of application costs
Billing for applications and their operational costs has always been a concern for IT organisations and their customers. In most cases, the models used are either too simple or too complex, which can lead to dissatisfaction. We show how an efficient compromise can be achieved.
Market & Sourcing
Co-creation in IT sourcing has many advantages
Time-critical innovations and constant regulatory pressure demand IT projects to be set up and implemented faster and faster. The challenge: complex and lengthy tendering processes. Co-creation in IT sourcing is supposed to make things better - can it deliver?
Costs & Benefits
How to reduce IT operating costs
In times of crisis, seemingly simple solutions to cut IT costs are very popular. But they also come at a high price, for example in IT operations. Three critical pitfalls must be avoided to help CIOs and IT managers prioritise spending more effectively and sustainably.
Market & Sourcing
Managing transition and transformation in IT sourcing
Most IT organisations misjudge their own involvement in the transition and transformation (T&T) in IT sourcing. The customer's resources play a decisive role in the success or failure of the partnership. How do you get the client and provider to negotiate the services provided on an equal footing and manage a smooth transition?
Market & Sourcing
IT Consultants 2024 - Record daily rates
External IT consultants are becoming increasingly expensive. Daily rates in IT infrastructure will continue to rise in 2024 across all skill levels. However, the growth will slow somewhat after a strong rise in recent years. There are also ways to limit the increase.
Costs & Benefits
How to optimise DevOps performance with a benchmark
DevOps is an attempt to combine the art of development with service efficiency. With a structured DevOps assessment, the collaboration of DevOps teams and their output can be evaluated internally and against the market to demonstrate performance and room for improvement.
Excellence & Organization
IT budgets 2024: modest growth expected
IT budgets in 2024 continue to be characterised by economic uncertainty. Their predicted growth rate is lower than the expected cost increases for IT services. IT security budgets continue to grow at double-digit rates.
Excellence & Organization
Orchestrate IT Service Providers with SIAM
SIAM is a method for efficiently managing, integrating and coordinating multiple IT service providers within an organisation. Why is SIAM useful in multi-sourcing environments and what are the specific benefits of implementing it?
Market & Sourcing
XLAs: Experience Level Agreements in IT sourcing
SLAs are standard in IT sourcing because people like to evaluate service providers based on hard facts. Now XLAs - Experience Level Agreements - are starting to take off. What exactly are they and what do they offer?
Methods & Tools
IT benchmarking - systematic analyses
IT organisations use benchmark comparisons to assess their costs and prices, as well as for other purposes. How do the two approaches differ and what other valuable insights can be gained with an IT benchmark?
Market & Sourcing
Imbalances in IT Sourcing
Managing supply and demand is an increasing challenge for buyers and IT managers, as the fragile structure can quickly become unbalanced. We show the most important reasons for IT sourcing imbalances.
Excellence & Organization
Effectiveness, Agility and Efficiency
The animal world offers fascinating examples of how animals use their environment efficiently, effectively and agilely to ensure their survival and continued existence. IT benchmarks analyse precisely these characteristics and compare them with the best.
Market & Sourcing
IT sourcing - faster and more efficient
Automation is a major driver of IT. In IT sourcing advisory, by contrast, things are still mostly done manually. Yet all stages in the sourcing lifecycle offer potential for useful automation solutions.
Market & Sourcing
ISG EMEA Sourcing Lead joins Metrics
ISG's former EMEA Sourcing Lead Dr Thomas Barnekow joins Metrics Group on 1 June 2023. He is a global thought leader in IT Sourcing and the architect of ISG's standard contract framework RFX One.
Costs & Benefits
Agile development pays off
Software is the infrastructure of the 21st century, developers are one of the most important tech professions. In a benchmarking study with Kearney, we found: Agile methods can help increase the efficiency of processes and developers.
Costs & Benefits
IT Security - the journey is the reward
IT security is not just a chore, but a real competitive advantage. Yet many still think of firewalls. But how can you check what's up to date and whether your own investments in IT security are appropriate?
Market & Sourcing
IT salaries - significant regional differences
You don't have to look to India first: IT salaries also differ significantly in European countries. We compared two regions in the south of Germany as well as cities and countryside in Bavaria.