As a business owner or executive, you have business goals. You have your 5-year goals or your long-term goals, and then there are steps along the way to reach those goals: medium-term goals and short-term goals.
If you were a retailer, you might have the following goals:
Short term: sells a certain amount every sunny day, a certain amount every rainy day, a certain amount every holiday, weekend, and weekday.
Medium term: Identify your best suppliers. Establish relationships with the most efficient, timely, reliable and innovative suppliers. Attract a larger number of baby boomers than your competition.
Long-term: Continue to create market innovations that can set you apart from your competition, such as innovative loyalty programs or cutting-edge technology at the point of purchase.
In business planning and business performance management, key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical to knowing where you are on your way to a given goal.
This is what Wikipedia says about KPIs:
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key performance indicator (
KPIs) is a measure of performance. Such measures are commonly used to help an organization define and assess how successful it is, usually in terms of progress toward its long-term organizational goals. KPIs can be specified by answering the question “What is really important to different stakeholders?”
Wikipedia mentions the long term, but that misses important short and medium term goals that I’ll explain shortly. The other key term here is “stakeholders.”
Each goal, whether short term or long term, has different stakeholders.
If you have daily retail sales goals, then a store manager must have access to data that shows them in real time what is happening in the store.
If you have quarterly or annual goals regarding your vendors and different customer segments, then an operations person or sales manager needs access to information that shows how you’re doing along these paths.
If you have long-term plans to create innovative solutions and become a market leader, then the CEO or owner needs access to key data to know how you are doing against these plans.
Different time frames, different stakeholders, different goals, different KPIs.
What tools are available to help you along the way?
David Abdo wrote a post titled “Business Intelligence Software: Who Is It Really For?” where he advocated for the democratization of business intelligence software across the enterprise.
The existence of a multi-level goal structure, as illustrated above, implies the requirement of a company to implement a business intelligence tool that is accessible to everyone within the company.
What are your thoughts on the matter?