How to Create and Deploy Effective Metrics

I’m trying to catch up on a big backlog of materials and documents and documents that I’ve found useful… Here’s an excellent best practices report from TDWI on “how to create and deploy effective metrics” (registration required). The introduction to the document explains the background: Performance metrics are a powerful tool of organizational change. The adage “What gets measured, gets done,” is true. Companies that define objectives,... [Read More...]

One KPI Is Never Enough to Manage… A Country?

This article in the International Herald Tribune (slowly becoming the “global edition of the New York Times”) gives an overview of why gross domestic product (GDP) is an inadequate measure of a country’s success. There are some interesting parallels with corporate KPIs and the use of profit as an indicator of corporate success: “The panel, chaired by two Nobel economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Amartya Sen of Harvard... [Read More...]

SAP’s Sustainability Dashboards

The SAP’s Sustainability Report web site provides a great example of how business intelligence can help with sustainability reporting and analysis. All public organizations will have to start providing this time of information in the future, and SAP BusinessObjects provides some great tools to do it with. Here are some of the Xcelsius dashboards that are provided as part of the report: Environment Carbon Footprint

It’s All About KPIs, Whatever You’re Trying to Achieve…

Here’s a quick selection of articles from just the last couple of weeks that show that performance management and key performance indicators are becoming mainstream in a variety of areas: SAP And Enterprise Support SAP has agreed a set of key performance indicators with its user group SUGEN, in order to measure the effectiveness of the controversial SAP Enterprise Support services introduced last year. And there’s real skin in the game: SAP has... [Read More...]

Bad Incentives

Effective performance management requires lining up incentives with desired outcomes. In practice, this is impossible — the best you can do is pick your problems. Today’s example, from the New York Times, “Paying Doctors to Ignore Patients“: “…the best way for a doctor to make money in his practice is not to spend time with patients but to use equipment as much as possible. That means moving the maximum number... [Read More...]