What percentage of all official airports is situated in the United States? You know that the distances to be covered are great, that people fly more in the US than anywhere else in the world and that many businesses have their own corporate jets. This ‘knowledge’ is a combination of scraps of information that we have collected in the course of time and now put together to formulate an answer. If you pose this question to a group of professionals, most of their responses would lie between 20% and 40%. The correct percentage is 30. But what would be the number of airports situated in the US? The answers are very diverse: from 1,000 to 50,000. If we have a relative figure, we can usually get close to the correct answer, but with an absolute we find ourselves at a complete loss. The correct answer is 14,858 airports.
The hearing of an absolute number prompts a lot of responses. That many? Unbelievable! An absolute answer is important to make people aware of something. The fact that 80% of a company’s customers are satisfied means relatively little to us. But when it becomes clear that the number of dissatisfied customers still runs into tens of thousands, we can easily picture an angry horde. When KPIs are used to illustrate performance, we need to focus on emotional impact as much as possible. We tend to respond better to an absolute figure. If you want to influence behaviour, you need to focus on KPIs that matter to people.
KPIs for IT are often relative figures such as a server availability of 99%. That doesn’t mean much to users (read: customers) or suppliers. There’s not much drive hidden in 99%. Why? Anything above 95% simply sounds like a great score on your report card. It does little to instil a sense of urgency. But the number of missed orders, the number of lost production hours or the number of dissatisfied users are figures about which people do feel IT has an impact on. The 99-dogma is lifeless, especially when it represents something that has no bearing on the real-life activities on the shop floor or in the field.
What is the business impact of an hour’s downtime of a core application? You need to express this in appealing terms. For example, what happens when the weighbridge application of Van Gansewinkel Group, a Dutch waste processing firm as well as provider of raw materials and energy, is offline in the Dutch regions? A mere hour later you have more than 350 garbage trucks standing still and unable to unload. This is equal to a tailback of 2.3 km. Such a traffic jam costs loads of money, causes irritation among the locals, poses a danger to other traffic and has a negative effect on the environment. Relating the solution time of this core application (with all supporting configuration items as infrastructure) to the theoretical length of the traffic jam results in a KPI that appeals to the imagination and is therefore topical. A gridlock KPI is ingenious because it is something everyone can identify with. IT workers want to prevent such a gridlock or at least resolve it as quickly as possible. By using instinctive examples they are able to better relate their own tasks (and priorities) to the business interests. For that reason it is vital to cut back on soulless KPIs and to arrive at examples that speak to the imagination and whose simplicity creates mutual understanding and are therefore ingenious!
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