HOW TO START MEASURING THE RIGHT KPIs
Hey group,
If I had to define the single most wrong approach in Business Intelligence, it would be to start with data already present instead of the information needed to solve a business problem.
Some years ago, I came across Bernie Smith and his Result-Oriented KPI System (ROKS) method. Fast forward to the age of AI – Bernie has just released a very helpful tool built on his rich repository of KPI knowledge. You'll find it at kpitree.studio. It's not free, but worth every penny.
Here's how it works:
Enter your industry, sector, and focus area. Add context if you like, then let AI help you develop KPI trees starting with the strategic goal, then themes, then tactics, and finally KPIs. You can overwrite suggestions at any step, and AI can even explain unfamiliar KPIs.
Once you've collected a solid list of KPIs, invite colleagues to vote – you decide how many votes each person gets and set a deadline. You'll see vote counts for every KPI, making shortlisting straightforward.
You can export your KPI tree in multiple formats.
Don't forget to check out the KPI Tree example in the attached PDF.
To sum up: It saves you time developing a KPI tree, eliminates paper, coffee breaks, stickers, and costs.
Stop starting from the data. Start with a strategic goal, then team up with your domain experts to identify the right KPIs that drive your business. Have fun.
I am working on a workbook that shows the 50 KPIs from the tree using demo data.
UPDATE: I used AI to build me the entire demo data set. And I used the new skill by Claude to generate the data model.
It requires some knowledge about data modelling, about Tableau, about AI and KPI trees but you can save a lot of time. Imagine to pre-develop a working blueprint of all the data to track these KPIs. Not only will your data-driven decisions be more precise, you will also save a lot of rework loops for the data engineers and frustration for the business.
