Depending on your role in the organisation your KPIs should have different levels of detail and different timeframes: The higher up in the organisation, the more focus on aggregated and strategic KPIs. Aggregated KPIs gives an overview of overall performance and strategic KPIs indicates whether the company is on a path to reach its long term goals.
More specialised roles have more specific KPIs. For a Web Editor it’s relevant to look at indicators related to visitors behaviour on the website. These KPIs are detailed and short term. A Chief Digital Officer on the other hand looks at KPIs related to the digital maturity of the company and how this aligns with profitability and competitiveness. So even if the websites’ performance is an important piece of the digital maturity, this piece needs to be included in a more aggregated KPI for the CDO.
There is always an opportunity cost to everything we do and if you focus on one thing, you pay less attention to something else. A CEO obsessing with conversion rate and the number of App-downloads, might not see the full consequence of a disruptive change in the market. And an e-commerce manager stressing out over a disruptive change in the market, might miss out on a broken sales funnel during Black Friday.
The two dimensions of KPIs: Level of detail and timeframe.
Click to enlarge the picture.
That being said, there’s also a need for some overlap; different people/roles can not look at their own KPIs in total isolation from each other (illustrated by the ellipses in the picture). A manager and his/her team for instance, need some mutual KPIs providing common ground when evaluating their performance. More on this in an upcoming blog post.
Andreas Franson, andreas[@]internetintelligence.se, +46 733 56 41 51
