Student Project D - Essay Example

nsultant who was hired by the chief operations officer (COO) of Phoenix, this brief paper will present ways to evaluate the performance of the central IT unit in its assigned task and subject a report. The information technology (IT) unit of any organization is often tasked with sensitive responsibilities with regards to the information needs of that organization. The evaluation of its performance can be subjective to a certain extent but there are measures or metrics by which its performance can be measure more objectively.

In other words, there are ways by which metrics are transformed into something concrete, objective, measurable, effective, and time-bound. The said criteria is basically what is used to measure information management (Blackmore, 2003). Measuring performance of any business unit encompasses two aspects, generally. These are the external business perspective and the internal users perspective. The first pertains to how an organization is considered effective by its customers who availed of its products and servicesj in terms of its response and the timeliness of response (Epstein, Manzoni, & Davila, 2010).

The internal side concerns more with perceptions, in particular, how people in particular departments react to their own business units. According to Blackmore, this is often called as perception management with regards to soft aspects of business operations. He called this aspect as perception management operations (PMO) which applies to how information is processed and how messages are sent to their intended target audience. In the case of Phoenix, its external users are the clients who access their company Web site perhaps to get updates on their investments.

It is therefore a critical aspect of customer perception that will determine performance of IT unit. The effectiveness of the central IT unit at Phoenix headquarters can be measured by use of the above criteria. The performance measures (metrics) are based both on hardware and also