IT executives have also been able to use metrics to determine which IT projects to shelve. For instance, Gibson and other IT and business executives at Cendant recently put the kibosh on a three-month-old e-commerce project after metrics indicated that it wasn't going to deliver a substantial enough return on investment.

The business view

For all the emphasis these IT leaders are placing on IT metrics, there's a lot of variation in how often senior business leaders want to review them. At Harrah's, Stanley and his team use their metrics to put together a quarterly operating report with project updates and IT spending summaries that senior executives can dive into.

At Hannaford Bros. Co., interest among senior executives in IT metrics depends on the project being measured, says CIO Bill Homa. For example, top managers at the Scarborough, Maine-based grocer are closely tracking the rollout of a task management system to its 140 stores that's intended to provide managers with a clear message about which operations to focus on each day, says Homa.

At Kaiser Permanente, metrics focus on how the IT infrastructure relates to business costs. The health care organization's IT group, called KP-IT, has created a set of "cost pools" within its data center services. If one of the health care units is running a call center application, for example, KP-IT can measure the percentage of a server's load that's being consumed by the application and the costs that are placed on that business unit as a result, says Michael Blake, vice president and chief financial officer at KP-IT in Oakland, Calif. "We have much more educated conversations with business leaders than we had before," says Blake.