Indicators and Measures

Ahh... One of my favorite classes in university was cost management systems. It was fundamentally a business management subject focused around the quantitative planning of business. One of the focuses of the class is to determine relevant measures to measure the success of the business. For you skeptics out there, it's more than just profits and the bottom line. Measures such as market share and customer retention amongst many others are equally or potentially more important.

One of the most important lessons about measures is what they represent. Fundamentally, they are used as indicators to affect business decisions. If things are going well, try to replicate the results, if things are going bad, then try a different strategy.

From a theoretical perspective, this is all pretty straight forward. But how is it relevant for you and me. You'd be surprised that there are many qualitative and quantitative measurements that we use on a regular basis, measures such as weight, academic marks and income are all examples. But you'd be surprised that there are now measures for almost everything you do online. One useful example that I've recently found is a site called Klout. Klout is a site that takes into account your social media accounts to give an aggregated score to your online social influence.

Logging into the site, I saw that my klout score was a low 37 or so. I linked in my other social media and it boosted it up to a below average 49. Because I wanted to get some context and comparison for my score, I invited some of my other friends to try out Klout. I also had the secondary intention of using it as a way of motivating them to be more active with their online presence, but that's a story for another time.

After looking into how the score is calculated and noticing that my score was actually a fair bit lower than my colleagues, Jeeno at 52, Connie at 59 and Vyse at 61, I realized I needed to do some work here. It's interesting to note that this score doesn't tell me a lot about why my score is low, but it's an indicator that some things need to change if I want to be more successful here. This led me to think about what I've been doing recently and what life was like when I was at uni. I realized that I was no longer involved with as many projects or people as when I was at uni. Of course my social influence would drop. So this highlighted to me that I had a potential social influence problem. With this data in mind, I can now change what I'm doing to better influence what I'm doing. I'll make sure that I get out and meet more people from now.

I guess that this blog post is to highlight, that there are many measures and indicators to our successful we are. It's therefore very important to always keep an eye out for these measures and use them as a guideline to make decisions in future.