Respond to the discussion post below. Your response must be at least 100 words long with proper punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. Support your response with at least 3 sources (articles/journals) written/published in the United States of America within the last 5 years. You may use the same sources used in the discussion post if they support your response. Consult the grading rubric to ensure requirements are met for this segment of the assignment.
Discussion Post:
Before completing this week's reading assignment, I always assumed efficiency and effectiveness were basically the same. One of the key ways to tell how efficient or effective an IT department is by using metrics. Metrics are a detailed measurement that feed Key Performance Indicators (KPI) (Computer Business Research, 2016). Efficiency IT metrics measure the performance of the system (technical aspect) like the speed, availability and throughput. Effectiveness IT metrics measures the results of the IT system like how many visitors to the website, bounce rate and conversion rate to name a few (Cain, 2012).
The interrelationship between efficiency and effectiveness metrics is that both are a measurement of how well the IT system is doing. The interdependence of the both metrics is how they rely on each other. If the efficiency metrics are low or bad, then it can cause a chain reaction and cause the effectiveness of the IT to go down. If the effectiveness is low it does not matter how efficient the system is, they system will have to be fixed. So each metrics requires the other one to be at a high level.
Metrics can be used to measure the whole development process along with each stage. In the development stage metrics should be used to track customer feedback (Bhuiyan, 2011). Customer feedback can cover areas such as degree of functional integration and degree of design effort on real customer priorities. As far as what phase is the most important, it is kind of a toss-up between development and testing. On one hand you need to make sure it is developed for the needs of the company. On the other hand the testing metrics covers the performance and customer-perceived value. I would have to say development because there is no point in testing it if you do not provide a product that is wanted/required.