Developing the Right Metrics Matters the Most

There are several ways a person could view an organization:

• As a collection of business processes (activities) that the business has to perform to meet its strategic objectives
• As a collection of IT applications that support the processes
• As a collection of people and suppliers who provide the resources necessary to achieve the organizational objectives
• As a collection of metrics or measures that describe the performance of the organization

Although each of these perspectives is equally real, only one is RIGHT in my opinion. Which one? METRICS, I say. Unless we boil our organizations into numbers and shared things that people can understand -- not complex and changing things like systems, processes, tools, and people -- can we really manage our organization as a program. I'm not making an argument for ACCOUNTING, per se, I'm talking about those facts and figures that tell us whether or not our business is being successful at achieving its objectives.

Therefore, it's my contention that a key part of the strategic planning and communications processes is to define and communicate about the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your business. KPIs are a bit of a cliche term but they're critical. The fundamental question we have to agree upon is, "How will we know that we are doing well?".

The more we develop this language of numbers and measurement, the more clear we will be together on our perception of what matters and how to allocate our resources and attention.

Scrabble, Boggle, Dictionaries, and Learning Tools

In this post I propose that advanced human intelligence and performance are enabled by real-time lookup tools (knowledge bases) such as dictionaries. Better information about processes (games) help expose information helpful to enhancing performance. Implementing systems and processes and games helps with success, adoption, and acceptance.

I spent a lot of time this weekend playing Boggle and Scrabble both on- and off-line. I recently came across an online dictionary that allows users to easily search for words that contain certain letters, start with XX, end with YY, etc. It's really useful for "cheating" in Scrabble. Check out http://www.morewords.com/. Not sure if morewords does it, but it would be great if they exposed their API so that other applications or users could plug in different dictionaries based on need. For example, right now their search results return words that aren't in the Official Scrabble Dictionary. Having the result set return the results of the dictionary with which you're playing --especially in the case of Scrabble-- is critical to this application's utility.

The best version of online Boggle that I've seen is at http://www.wordsplay.net/. The game "knows" all of the words that exist for the given board, the words that at least one player got, the words that you got, the words that only you got, etc. It's really interesting and fun to play, plus it's a great learning tool so you can "whoop" your friends when you play off-line. Learning the uncommon 4-letter words is key to mastery.

Scrabulous is in the news now for being sued by Hasbro due to infringement. Scrabulous is another great online game because of its flexibility in game modes. For example, you can play in real-time or asynchronously over email. Although the "game" (fundamental structure) remains the same, some of its dimensions can be configured.

These games are interesting and their connection to word search services like morewords.com could enable new gaming experiences in the future.

Games that capture and expose detailed comparative metrics that allow players to compare and compete on a variety of levels. Allowing people to look for their personal strengths and weaknesses as well as those of their competition gives new information and redefines competition. Instead of just winning and losing, users can now look at other facets that allow them to develop improvement strategies relevant to them. Exposing the model data and output of the good players to the lesser players promotes the lesser players' progression. In Scrabble, examples of "other metrics" (than total score) include 1) longest word(s) 2) highest word point value 3) most words created on single play 4) most points with fewest letters. There are a number of metrics embedded and inherited by the game that are not yet exposed to the users. This lack of information constrains growth.

To me, all of this is relevant to business in that tools can improve performance and by capturing good data about human performance and process, the lower performers are able to "come up" because good performance has been defined and modeled. Game theory is like process management in that numerous variants and metrics can be defined once the fundamental structure (game) is defined.