Tag: KPIs

Analytics, Business Intelligence, Data Analysis, Data Governance, Predictive Analytics

What Makes a Metric Actionable?

In data and analytics, not all metrics are created equal. Some look impressive on dashboards but don’t actually change behavior or decisions. Regardless of the domain, an actionable metric is one that clearly informs what to do next.

Here we outline a few guidelines for ensuring your metrics are actionable.

Clear and Well-Defined

An actionable metric has an unambiguous definition. Everyone understands:

  • What is being measured
  • How it’s calculated
  • What a “good” or “bad” value looks like

If stakeholders debate what the metric means, it has already lost its usefulness.

Tied to a Decision or Behavior

A metric becomes actionable when it supports a specific decision or action. You should be able to answer:
“If this number goes up or down, what will we do differently?”
If no action follows a change in the metric, it’s likely just informational, not actionable.

Within Someone’s Control

Actionable metrics measure outcomes that a team or individual can influence. For example:

  • Customer churn by product feature is more actionable than overall churn.
  • Query refresh failures by dataset owner is more actionable than total failures.

If no one can realistically affect the result, accountability disappears.

Timely and Frequent Enough

Metrics need to be available while action still matters. A perfectly accurate metric delivered too late is not actionable.

  • Operational metrics often need near-real-time or daily updates.
  • Strategic metrics may work on a weekly or monthly cadence.

The key is alignment with the decision cycle.

Contextual and Comparable

Actionable metrics provide context, such as:

  • Targets or thresholds
  • Trends over time
  • Comparisons to benchmarks or previous periods

A number without context raises questions; a number with context drives action.

Focused, Not Overloaded

Actionable metrics are usually simple and focused. When dashboards show too many metrics, attention gets diluted and action stalls. Fewer, well-chosen metrics lead to clearer priorities and faster responses.

Aligned to Business Goals

Finally, an actionable metric connects directly to a business objective. Whether the goal is improving customer experience, reducing costs, or increasing reliability, the metric should clearly support that outcome.

In Summary

A metric is actionable when it is clear, controllable, timely, contextual, and directly tied to a decision or goal. If a metric doesn’t change behavior or inform action, it may still be interesting—but it isn’t driving actionable value.
Good metrics don’t just describe the business. They help run it.

Thanks for reading and good luck on your data journey!

Analytics, Business Intelligence, Data Governance, Data Strategy, Data Visualization

Metrics vs KPIs: What’s the Difference?

The terms metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Understanding the difference helps teams focus on what truly matters instead of tracking everything.

What Is a Metric?

A metric is any quantitative measure used to track an activity, process, or outcome. Metrics answer the question:

“What is happening?”

Examples of metrics include:

  • Number of website visits
  • Average query duration
  • Support tickets created per day
  • Data refresh success rate

Metrics are abundant and valuable. They provide visibility into operations and performance, but on their own, they don’t always indicate success or failure.

What Is a KPI?

A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a specific type of metric that is directly tied to a strategic business objective. KPIs answer the question:

“Are we succeeding at what matters most?”

Examples of KPIs include:

  • Customer retention rate
  • Revenue growth
  • On-time data availability SLA
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A KPI is not just measured—it is monitored, discussed, and acted upon at a leadership or decision-making level.

The Key Differences

Purpose

  • Metrics provide insight and detail.
  • KPIs track progress toward critical goals.

Scope

  • Metrics are broad and numerous.
  • KPIs are few and highly focused.

Audience

  • Metrics are often used by analysts and operational teams.
  • KPIs are used by leadership and decision-makers.

Actionability

  • Metrics may or may not drive action.
  • KPIs are designed to trigger decisions and accountability.

How Metrics Support KPIs

KPIs rarely exist in isolation. They are usually supported by multiple underlying metrics. For example:

  • A customer retention KPI may be supported by metrics such as churn by segment, feature usage, and support response time.
  • A data platform reliability KPI may rely on refresh failures, latency, and incident counts.

Metrics provide the diagnostic detail; KPIs provide the direction.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

  • Too many KPIs: When everything is “key,” nothing is.
  • Unowned KPIs: Every KPI should have a clear owner responsible for outcomes.
  • Vanity KPIs: A KPI should drive action, not just look good in reports.
  • Misaligned KPIs: If a KPI doesn’t clearly map to a business goal, it shouldn’t be a KPI.

When to Use Each

Use metrics to understand, analyze, and optimize processes.
Use KPIs to evaluate success, guide priorities, and align teams around shared goals.

In Summary

All KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs. Metrics tell the story of what’s happening across the business, while KPIs highlight the chapters that truly matter. Strong analytics practices use both—metrics for insight and KPIs for focus.

Thanks for reading and good luck on your data journey!

Business Intelligence, Data Strategy, Data Warehousing, Reporting

Terminology Primer – Goals, Objectives, Measures, Metrics, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Meters

The essential purpose of business intelligence is to provide information that will allow people throughout an organization to make informed decisions relevant to their business processes and responsibilities.  This post is a simple terminology primer that describes the meaning of a few terms commonly used in business intelligence, and explain how they relate to each other, and their relevance to supporting the overall goals of an organization.

Goals are a business’ desired outcomes. They are typically around growth, cost savings, innovation, improvement in efficiency, the company’s workforce, and the competition, but may include a lot of other things.
Goals help a company to stay focused by providing team members within a company with an aim to work towards.

Objectives are specific strategies and steps that a business needs to take to achieve the goals that have set. These objectives are usually specific and measurable.  Success toward achieving objectives usually indicates progress toward achieving goals.
Objectives are sometimes referred to as Critical Success Factors because they are critical to the success of achieving the goals.

Measures are numeric representations of various transactions that occur through various business processes. For example, when the company makes a sale (during the sales process), some measures that are generated in that transaction are:  sales amount, discount amount, number of items sold, and number of items discounted.  Then from this, other measures can be determined, such as total sales for all customers, total number of items sold, total number of sales for each customer, and so on.  Measures are numeric and therefore can have mathematical calculations performed on them – such as sum, avg., min, max, etc. – to generate metrics.

Metrics are calculations derived from one or more measures. For example, as mentioned in an example above, you may have the measures “Discount Amount” and “Number of Items Discounted”, and you may use these measures to calculate a metric of “Average Discount Amount per Discounted Item” or “Average Discount Amount per Sale”.  As another example, you may simply add up all the Discount Amounts over a specific time period, such as month, to get a “Total Discount Amount by Month” metric.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics that measure how well a company is doing toward their objectives. Companies will have hundreds or thousands of metrics, but there will be a few key ones that the executive team wants to keep a close eye on for the overall company or divisions, and other managers will want to keep an eye on KPIs relevant to their respective departments.  Those key metrics are the KPIs. All KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs.

Meters are a group of metrics that collectively provide a broader, overall view of a subject area.
For example, you may have individual metrics for Sales to Date, Sales in Pipeline, Number/Value of Expiring Contracts, Avg. Time to Close Sales, etc. Putting these all together in a Meter presents the user with a lot of related information that provides a broad, overall picture of sales (and loss of sales) which would allow for analysis such as determining the chances of meeting sales targets. The Meter in this example could be called “Sales Forecast” for example.

Thanks for reading!