Metrics and the Source of all Knowledge

Business Intelligence Review: "Many times metrics are used as a weapon against the staff member. Dr. Edward Deming often said, 'We need to drive fear out of the workplace.' But most performance measurement systems do exactly the opposite. When management does act on a metric, they don't always look at the business process. Instead they focus on someone, some other department or some outside factor to 'blame' causing people to play the system and to point their fingers elsewhere when problems arise. Many times the metrics selected are too high level to provide information where someone can take action to address before problems develop. In other cases, an important result gets looked at, but it is impacted by so many variables it is difficult to determine the degree of correlation. For example, is a three percent decrease in the rate of content due to improvements in the process or variability in the measurement system? The metrics show a result, but it may be too late to take any corrective action; which leads us to understand that by the time a problem is discovered, it is too late to do anything about it. In the world of meta data, there are an infinite number of possible metrics. This article will define the foundation metrics that each and every meta data implementation should review in detail: content and usage."