In class this week, we had a detailed discussion regarding metrics vs KPIs. This is very important to understand the difference in business intelligence to understand what to show managers in your dashboards, reports, and other business intelligence analytics.

According to http://itsm.certification.info/metrics.html,

"A metric is any standard of measurement - number of incidents logged, average time to log incident, percentage incidents resolved within agreed service level etc.
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a metric that you have chosen that will give an indication of your performance and can be used as a driver for improvement. In general it's preferred to just chose a few KPIs (say 3 or 4) to focus on.


The point is this: a metric is just a measurement. A KPI is an indicator (a metric) that you have chosen, and agreed with your partners (whether internal to IT or with customers), that will determine whether you are meeting your critical success factors (CSF)."

Based on these definitions and the ones discussed in class, metrics are numerical numbers and KPIs use the metrics to measure the overall performance of  the company at that given time. I have used KPIs in my career with SQL Server 2008 and they have been an important part of any report or dashboard that will be targeted towards Upper management. These KPIs will give them an understanding of whether or not everything is performing well. If there is a problem, they can perform data analysis in cubes, pivot tables, or other tools to drill down into the data better.

Below is an example of an executive dashboard that shows top level managers the current performance. In this specific dashboard, there are multiple gauges. I think gauges have their place in dashboards, but it seems like this dashboard overuses the amount of gauges to put on one page, but that is not too important. I think that the color scheme is very useful to let managers know immediately where there are problems at. The red, green, and yellow scheme does not require a legend to understand.

Source: http://www.dashboardspy.com/img/hospital-executive-dashboard-kpi.jpg

I am very interested in continuing to learn, develop, and deploy dashboards, reports, and analytical tools in my business intelligence career.