Key Performance Indicators, Driving you to Success
Posted on Tue, Jun 22, 2010
Love them or loathe them Key performance indicators drive your life whether you are in a private or public organisation. You can’t manage anything unless you “measure it” and “what gets measured gets done”, these are just two of the justifications for developing key performance indicators. The objective of producing Key Performance indicators is to give you the information to allow you to make better decisions.
In theory, Key Performance Indicators provide a series of measures against which you can judge success or failure. They are intended to be quantifiable measurements, agreed to beforehand, that reflect the critical success factors of an organization and their objective is to reduce the complex nature of an organisation to a small number of key measures. In practice, unless developed to improve the organisation, Key Performance Indicators can be a rod for your back. Too many Key Performance Indicators have no specific and achievable measures and they simply create more work without benefiting the organisation.
When you decide which Key Performance Indicators to use, it is important to use factors that are key to the organization reaching its goals. It is also important to keep the number of Key Performance Indicators small just to keep everyone's attention focused on achieving them. You should also define the Key Performance Indicators and keep them consistent from year to year. In addition you will need to set agreed and achievable targets for them.
Key Performance Indicators can, and should, be used by all parts of the organisation. They should be used to as indicators from which the necessary actions to rectify problems or resolve issues can be taken.
At QlikPower we have been able to spend more time with our customers developing appropriate Key performance indicators because we use QlikView as our Business Intelligence tool of choice. By not building a data warehouse we can spend more time working with a company to identifying and implement the key performance indicators they will use.
See how QlikView and Key performance indicators work with our new World Cup App.