Whilst it's really important to know that, if you are trying to achieve something, you're making progress towards the objective. However, increasingly we seem to be in a world cursed by a plague of measuring things that are easy to measure.
There was an article in Advertising Age today which came up in conversation with a colleague. There are some interesting comments, and one in particular pointing to the meaninglessness of companies using number of friends on Facebook, or number of tweets on Twitter as meaningful indicators of anything (other than, of course, the number of friends on Facebook and the number of tweets on Twitter).
The Web2.0 world is a great environment for measuring things that are easy to measure. Since the early days of the World Wide Web and the fashion for hit counters, through increasingly complicated web usage monitoring, through to the social networking world, simple to generate statistics have taken on the confusing identity of objectives in their own right. At one stage at the BBC, budgets for some of the websites on bbc.co.uk were being set by the number of hits in the previous year. The bigger the number, the more the budget. No reference to whether it was useful or valuable content.
It also strikes me that customer contact centres have fallen prey to this in the past. Imagine a world where the main statistic you can generate is how many rings the customer had to wait before the phone was picked up. Then, you set a target to reduce that wait to, say, four rings. You can measure it so you achieve it. Then some bright spark suggests that if you get an automated system to pick up the calls automatically you can smash the target… and customers now go immediately into “Press 9 to lose the will to live' worlds.
All the while, what the customer is looking for is their issue to be resolved effectively and in a timely manner. But hey, that's damn hard to measure, so we stick to the things that are easy, even if they are stupid.
mmitII 