InetSoft BI Webcast: Best Practices for Selecting KPIs

Below is a continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of Best Practices for Key Performance Indicators. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): There are a few best practices I can recommend when it comes to selecting key performance indicators, or KPIs. A middle-of-the road approach between a top-down and a bottom-up approach is recommended.

Some people talk about a hub-and-spoke approach to performance management, because on the one hand, you don’t want to do this in silos. You don’t want each department creating their own metrics which overlap or create inconsistencies with other departments. But on the other end, any enterprise that tries to centralize the management of metrics and all the associated governance will fail. Those BI initiatives collapse under their own weight and bureaucracy and red tape and too many processes.

Some kind of hub and spoke environment for performance metrics has its place. Anything that has to be managed and handled and monitored at a corporate level, anything that is mission-critical, anything that goes across the enterprise boundaries, all of this belongs in a hub.

But when it is the case that no one outside of a particular product line or a particular department is ever going to look at the metrics, for example, marketing campaign effectiveness metrics, where probably nobody outside of the marketing and sales departments is going to look at them, then create those on the spokes. The back office, finance and HR departments probably don’t need to know about these metrics. So make your performance metrics dashboard more agile based on the breadth of the audience.