What exactly are meaningful metrics?

Ah Monday.  Time to get the brain moving again.  And as usual, Computerworld has some interesting articles that will get your gears churning.  I (of course) enjoyed this article about two of the top keys to successful BI implementations.  The top two keys, it seems, are corporate buy in and data governance.

In the case of garnering corporate buy in, one of the suggestions mentioned is that you should "pick a handful of metrics that are meaningful..."  It's a suggestion that 1-800-Flowers used to gain executive buy-in for its BI implementation.  My question is, what the heck are meaningful metrics?

Unfortunately, that question has no easy answer.  There is just no single set of metrics that will be meaningful for every single organization that's attempting to implement business intelligence.  You can assume that some metrics will be useful to all businesses, but when you're talking about the metrics that will convince the suits that IT dollars should be invested in BI...well, then you're in a whole different ballgame than just useful.

Meaningful metrics need to be metrics that can make a real difference for your organization, and they should be based on the business problem that you're trying to solve by implementing business intelligence.  I know.  There's that phrase again.  The 'business problem' is the only reason that you should implement any new technology in the first place.  And in the second place, your business problem will be much different than even your direct competition. 

See, there can be two shipping companies, both transporting the same products in the same regions, but Shipping Company One will have a very different problem than Shipping Company Two.  For example, maybe the business problem that Shipping Company One needs to solve is how to reduce the cost of transporting products from one place to another, while Shipping Company Two needs to find ways to service customers more effectively.  The business problems in those situations will be very different business problems, and so the two companies can implement the exact same BI solution, but have different meaningful metrics. 

Getting back to the original idea of 'what the heck is a meaninful metric,' the answer is simply, a metric that demonstrates how your business problem is being solved.  Simply might be a bit of a misnomer in this case, however, but it's those very metrics that prove to be so elusive.  And the only way to be sure that you have the right metrics and are measuring them is to first clearly identify the business problem that you need to solve.  Only then can you gather effective, meaningful metrics that will demonstrate for executives how (and why) business intelligence should be an organization-wide technology.