Why picking the right metrics is so important

Without tracking the right numbers, we are doing a disservice to the boon of technology-enabled accessibility of data and to our own professional missions as well. It is thus incumbent upon us to judiciously utilize the opportunity offered by the information boom of the present times and focus on the right indicators

We live in a world where numbers are everywhere. From news reports to political manifestos and from ad campaigns to an organization's internal reports, we are witnessing a profusion of statistics. This can be attributed to the widespread deployment of technology and can be viewed as a positive development, an emblem of the scientific age of our times. Yet, the caveats of reliance on statistics have to be considered. One, not all numbers are of equal relevance and two, statistics can be created from data to suit particular narratives than the truths needed for transformative and necessary actions. For example, you might need to know about the sales of a particular product but research may yield all sorts of distracting information not relevant to the central question. Similarly, in the case of deceptive statistics, an agency might claim they have massively expanded their reach with a 50 per cent jump, when the actual numbers might have just grown from 10 people to 15, in a location with over 500 people. In these cases, what we need is a process of judicious assessment, one that disregards unnecessary and misleading numbers to consider the right metrics.

"Right now we're going through a Cambrian explosion of metrics," says Johan Bollen, an informatics scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington as quoted by Nature and in a survey by Richard Van Noorden, the journal notes that scientific performance indicators are proliferating - leading researchers to ask afresh what they are measuring and why. This question itself has to be the foundation of any discerning approach to numbers - what are you measuring and why? The right metrics are found through the right search and the right search is supposed to have a worthy rationale and meaningful ends in mind.

Consider the world of business, which is characterized by too many seemingly significant metrics, varying from costs of doing business to key performance indicators. If the story of your business enterprise is such that it is able to cover its costs and yet unable to expand, studying and tracking the costs of business might not be the most useful idea. Instead, focussing on the retention rate of consumers i.e. the loyal customers who stay with your brand, the ones who leave and the ones whose fixations remain indeterminate can help chalk a roadmap for the future. On a related note, looking at the productivities of employees on an individual basis and guiding them to further engagement with the target consumer base can yield exceptional results. These are the numbers which have to be consciously utilized instead of being flummoxed by a vast pool of available data.

Similarly, think of another example, this time, in the realm of administering an educational institution committed to the mission of inclusive and quality education. Instead of heedlessly looking at attendance rates and average scores which might be satisfactory, to ensure optimal outcomes, the administrators can look at enrolments from different demographic groups, popularity of courses in terms of the rate of graduation and sustained performances of students, batch-after-batch and research and creative projects undertaken. These indicators, instead of a lazy examination of raw data can further the mission of imparting worthy education. Thus, reading the right numbers has to be contextual as there are no fixed sets of determinants that can be of direct help universally.

Recognizing the right metrics is a step in the direction of bolstering the democratization of data and making it more meaningful. As McKinsey notes, democratization has involved getting analytics out of the exclusive hands of the statistics gurus, and into the hands of a broad base of frontline users as without needing to know a single line of coding, frontline users of new technology tools can link data from multiple sources. Visualization tools, meanwhile, are putting business users in control of the analytics tools by making it easy to slice and dice data, define the data exploration needed to address the business issues, and support decision making. When technology has made it possible for employees to directly access data, the meaningfulness of this access inevitably lies in acknowledging the relevant metrics and tracking them, to glorious ends.

Without tracking the right numbers, we are doing a disservice to the boon of technology-enabled accessibility of data and to our own professional missions as well. It is thus incumbent upon us to judiciously utilize the opportunity offered by the information boom of the present times and focus on the right indicators. Growth and progress have to be conscious and engaging with the right metrics can consolidate our quest for ever-improving outcomes.

(The author is Chief Impact Officer at Recykal Foundation)