Is Your Organization Ready for the Analytics Challenge?

There is so much emphasis on analytics these days. Transforming the right data into rich information, profound knowledge, deep insight, and continually greater wisdom will help us solve many of the world’s most vexing problems. However, data alone will often lead to the wrong conclusions and actions.

If your organization wants to become a more insightful, smarter, and wiser, I urge you to answer the following questions and consider the qualities that underlie them:

1. Is your organization measuring the things that matter most to the organization and its stakeholders?

2.  Is the alignment between performance measures and strategy clear to everyone?

3.  Is your organization regularly adding innovative (transformational) indicators of the most important (but difficult-to-measure) intangible assets and dimensions of performance?

4. Are obsolete metrics regularly being eliminated?

5.  Is the value of measurement widely understood throughout the organization?

6.  Are the dangers of poor and wrong measurement acknowledged and addressed?

7.  Are employees at all levels being educated about how to use measurement data and information effectively?

8.  Do employees have positive attitudes about performance measurement and its potential to improve all aspects of organizational effectiveness?

9.  Is performance measurement information trusted?

10. Are executives deeply engaged in measurement-related dialogues?

11. Are employees given the time to analyze and interpret performance measurement information and its implications for their jobs?

12. Does the organization place a high priority on learning from measurement?

13. Do functions and departments work together to integrate their metrics with each other?

14. Is there a holistic approach to performance measurement in the organization?

15. Is there someone explicitly designated as primarily responsible for managing the organization’s measurement system?

16. Is the organization well aligned around the most strategic metrics?

17. Are key performance indicators regularly being reviewed and revised?

18. Is there widespread and active dialogue throughout the organization about performance measurement?

19. Are the organization's measurement capabilities continually being assessed and enhanced?

20. Do key stakeholders within and outside the organization understand and trust the analytical methods that are being used?

If your organization has considerable room for improvement related to the questions/areas above, check out my book Transforming Performance Measurement.