Plato apparently said “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers”. Having worked with successful balanced scorecards, KPI dashboards, measurement programmes with functional size measurement at its core, ISO/IEC 15504 capability level assessment baselining, one would expect that I would oppose Plato’s statement, in support of this issue’s theme.

However, I admit some disillusionment in the world of numbers. In addition to the successes I’ve experienced at my previous companies, I love to hear successful measurement stories of improvements to organisation success, productivity and frameworks. I even love to hear about the excellent quest to support practical application growing with users and not stagnating.

What has caused disillusionment is that "measures" can be less than ideal.

• Measures are emotion-free snapshots:

How do we manage Nations with the marginal political victories in recent elections in Australia, US or any number of AGMs? Are they just a snapshot of the confidence we have in our elected leaders? How do we manage in the face of these akward figures? How do we get the national/organisational culture to move on and work to achieve its organisation’s goals)? Would your measurement framework cope with something equivalent to the recent Wikileaks challenge? Is it simply taking a lateral view on establishing a multi-dimensional framework to cover all governance areas? Or are such challenges just "noise" to be removed from the measures in order to keep reporting simple for your management? 

• Measures are qualitative, as well as quantitative.

Consider an individual's KPIs for, say "integrity" that one could never over-achieve on as a measure! Tenders have been awarded based on measurement-driven weighted spreadsheets with well-defined criteria, as well as relationships and trust ("priceless"). We recently worked with a customer to measure their capability to implement two solution options based on past process performance. The associated risks (qualitative) with each option, as well as the capability levels achieved in the past, provided a valuable indication of potential future performance.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said “Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.” Looking at maturity models and measurement, we can rephrase this as: measurement maturity is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite. As management matures from art to science, managers distil the infinite mountains of world-wide information to the most critical finite measures, making more reasoned decisions that are based on measures, but also guided by our experience and intuition.