Executive decision framework
How a technology leader evaluates a business problem.
Choose a scenario. The framework lists what a leader would typically weigh before recommending a path.
Illustrative decision support — not a guaranteed recommendation or an actual client result.
Options to evaluate
- Refresh on-premises or colocation
- Rehost to IaaS with reserved capacity
Technical & operational trade-offs
- Consumption pricing improves flexibility but needs active cost governance to avoid drift
- Higher availability needs redundancy across sites/zones, raising cost and operational complexity
- A hybrid model balances control and scale but needs clear role boundaries (RACI) between parties
Cost categories & assumptions
- One-time: migration, transition, training, and dual-running period
- OPEX: subscriptions, consumption, managed-service fees
- Ongoing: support, monitoring, security tooling, staffing
- Assumptions to validate: volumes, growth rate, discount terms, exchange rates, exit costs
Risks & dependencies
- Dependency on accurate asset and application inventory (CMDB/ITAM)
- Security, backup and DR controls must be tested before go-live, not after
- Knowledge transfer and transition quality between parties
- Change fatigue and skills gaps in operating teams
Suggested KPIs
- Service availability vs. target
- Major incidents per month
- Mean time to restore
Implementation phases
- Discover: baseline costs, assets, service levels and dependencies
- Design: compare options, build business case, agree success measures
- Pilot: validate with a limited scope and measure against baseline
- Transition / implement in waves with rollback plans
- Operate & optimise: review KPIs, costs and risks on a fixed cadence
Governance & ownership
- Executive sponsor owns the business outcome; service owner owns day-to-day performance
- Monthly service review; quarterly business review against KPIs and budget
- Contracted SLAs with service credits, plus a joint RACI and escalation path
Executive KPI frameworks
What to measure, and how to read it.
Example KPI definitions with measurement context. No historical performance figures are shown — targets depend on each organisation's contracts and baseline.
Infrastructure
- Availability
- Percentage of agreed service time a system is usable.
- Context: Measured per service against its SLA; exclude agreed maintenance windows only if the SLA says so.
- Capacity utilisation
- Used vs. available compute, storage and network.
- Context: Track trend and headroom; sustained high use signals risk, low use signals waste.
- Recovery readiness
- Share of critical systems with tested backup and DR meeting RTO/RPO.
- Context: Counts only successful tests within the last test cycle.
- Change success rate
- Changes completed without incident or rollback ÷ total changes.
- Context: Taken from the change records; review failed changes in CAB.
Service desk
- SLA attainment
- Tickets resolved within the agreed time ÷ total tickets.
- Context: Report by priority; a high average can hide P1 misses.
- Mean time to resolve
- Average time from ticket logged to resolved.
- Context: Use median too, since a few long tickets skew the average.
- Backlog
- Open tickets older than an agreed age.
- Context: Watch the trend weekly; rising backlog precedes SLA breaches.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
- Share of positive survey responses after resolution.
- Context: Read with response rate; low response rates bias results.
Cloud & FinOps
- Budget variance
- (Actual − budget) ÷ budget for the period.
- Context: Explain variances by driver: volume, price, or new services.
- Utilisation
- Consumed vs. provisioned or committed resources.
- Context: Includes reserved-instance and savings-plan coverage.
- Forecast accuracy
- 1 − |actual − forecast| ÷ actual.
- Context: Measured monthly; improves as tagging and ownership improve.
- Unit cost
- Cost per business unit of work (per user, transaction, VM).
- Context: Links spend to value; needs reliable cost allocation.
MSP / GCC delivery
- Service performance
- Contracted SLAs/KPIs met ÷ total measured.
- Context: Reviewed monthly in service reviews; tied to service credits for MSPs.
- Transition quality
- Services transitioned on time with no major incident in the hypercare period.
- Context: Measured per wave against acceptance criteria.
- Governance actions closed
- Actions from service reviews closed by due date.
- Context: Shows whether governance changes behaviour, not just reports.
- Workforce capability
- Roles with required skills/certifications vs. plan.
- Context: Taken from skills matrix; include attrition and backfill time.
Leadership
- Risk closure
- High risks mitigated or accepted by due date.
- Context: From the risk register; review at steering committee.
- Delivery milestones
- Milestones achieved on plan ÷ planned.
- Context: Report with reasons for slippage and recovery actions.
- Skills development
- Planned training and knowledge-transfer completed.
- Context: Pair with on-the-job measures such as first-contact resolution.
- Stakeholder satisfaction
- Structured feedback from business stakeholders.
- Context: Collected quarterly; follow up on low scores with actions.