Senior IT managers typically don't share many stories about what has or hasn't worked for them because e-commerce is viewed as a potentially huge source of sales and profits. No one wants to give away their big-money secrets. Rather, the metrics most often used to measure the success of Internet projects are of a much smaller scale. For example, log files can be used to catalog who visits a site, when they visit and what they do there - data from which analysts can extrapolate whether a given link or set of pages is effective. The IT department can create survey boxes to solicit opinions from random Web visitors.
Software packages can test how quickly pages load and whether links are broken.
But these measures don't yield much concrete material about how a company's Internet efforts compare with those of its rivals and whether it spends IT money wisely. A few companies, such as Keynote Systems Inc. in San Mateo, Calif., and Hackett Benchmarking and Research in Hudson, Ohio, have begun to sell consulting services to address these questions. Hackett, for example, instructs user companies to collect specific data from business units and their IT groups about the performance of and costs associated with key applications. For instance, a recent Hackett study at TRW Inc., an automotive and aerospace products maker in Cleveland, required the company to collect data on such items as spending on hardware, software, networking and staff, as well as details on how supplier contracts are managed. Hackett then helps the client run the information through proprietary benchmarking software and databases that contain similar data from 1,600 other companies.