Are metrics practicable for IT? That is the question one reader asks of Advice Line guru Bob Lewis. “As I was crafting a message to a colleague today, I had an ‘ah-ha moment’ fueled by and reinforcing my skepticism,” the reader explains. “I wondered: Can we measure the value of performance metrics?” Lewis answers: “Ah, you remind me of me! Way back when, I asked the budget director of my then employer what the Return on Investment was on the budgeting process.”Getting back to the concrete, though, “for questions of this kind — do metrics/SMART goals/outsourcing/offshoring/whatever the heck — result in business success, I go back to the two big studies I know about that looked at the sources for long-term business success,” Lewis writes in The ROI of Metrics. Technology Industry