I remember before I was exposed more to Business Intelligence lingo I would get very confused by peoples use of the term KPI – Key Performance Indicator.
Since then I have been involved in multiple projects aimed at creating KPI’s or Scorecards and have been consistently baffled by the number of KPI’s that an organization feels is key. Of course I am not naive and understand in each area of a business different measures are key and so that’s why on an enterprise project there often many. Back in the late 80’s I was involved in an Executive Information System (EIS) that was really neat and the executives largely only wanted 4-9 items to watch with colours. But I think that was because the systems were early in their evolution and understanding.
Now we have big honking data warehouses, business unit or specialized data marts and we can slice and dice the data many different ways. Now we are in an area where we get into information overload. So in a recent conversation I know now why a client started only talking about dimensions and measures and left the vehicle of delivery (reports, dashboards, …) out.
Because it isn’t about the report, but that is a nice name for the result, but it is about the dimensions and measures we are trying to extract about our business.
