Introduction: Why metering matters

By Signe Marie Stenseth, Vice President, OpeniT, Inc.

The focus of this paper is to examine usage metering in an E&P IT environment can be beneficial for many stakeholders; executives and IT management, individual users, and also providers to the industry.

Many of you are asked to do more with less: Invest in new technology with a shrinking software budget or cover more tasks with fewer resources. Many of you have a security focus. All of you are high-end users of technology, with little tolerance for denials and bad performance of your systems. And finally, many of you provide software or services and you want the end-users to have as much value from your delivery as possible. In that way they will be your long term customer.

The proposition of this paper is the following: You should all benefit from metering information technology resource usage in your environment or at your customer site. Regardless of your position, being the CIO, a team leader, a portfolio manager, a support person, an account executive or a high-end technical user, my claim is that all of you would be more successful in your job if you had an overview of how critical IT resources are in use. A few key reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, would add a lot of value to you all as stakeholders.

The structure of this paper first will be to explain why metering matters and what you can expect to accomplish with metering. Secondly, we will go through business cases where E&P organizations have introduced metering of IT usage and where they have clearly benefited from it. The last part of the paper has a practical aim to it: We will discuss the common obstacles of getting started and give you some advice on what to look for and how to move forward with usage metering.