Goodbye KPIs, Hello Data Quality

There’s a truth to Tom Peter’s famous quote “what gets measured, gets done”. Peters was a writer and thinker on management practice who advocated the use of quality measures, today we refer to these quality measures as “Key Performance Indicators” or KPIs.

In 1986 when Peters encouraged executives to adopt a mindset of measurement and performance, the notion of a KPI made sense, data was hard to come by, data skills were specialised and tools to analyse data were not available to all staff members.

Today everyone with a laptop can process and analyse data. We can do away with the notion that data is gathered to analyse a single metric, but instead, organisations should be thinking about building up high-quality data repositories that can sustain a range of different analyses. Teams shouldn’t be bound by a set of analyses but instead by a range of features and complete records.

Building a business, governing a country or running a procurement service requires reliable, consistent data, bent to your will and corralled into the needs of decision-makers. Understanding value, savings, supplier performance, social impact, emissions, and corruption can all be done with the right sort of data.

Have broad ambitions, understand your data needs, but most of all build databases that will give you insights, not just for today, but for tomorrow and beyond.

If you’d like to know more about using Spend Network to aggregate and manage your procurement data, get in touch.