Boot on the Monitor

Shawn on monitoring and then Michael Yafle's response.

I think a distinction needs to be made been reporting and monitoring. There's generally lots of reporting going on in organisations - which I think is what Michael is talking about.

Reporting is about providing numbers around fairly fixed and familiar metrics - e.g. signings, revenue, costs, headcount. You may even implement a balanced scorecard - which is supposed to measure other things than just financials. Of course, implementing a BSC is not the same actually paying attention to what it says.

N.B. Reporting isn't a bad thing. Always be prepared for someone to ask you "How much did you make / spend last year?" - if no one else, it'll be the tax man.

I would suggest that monitoring complex systems is different to straight reporting. What is often missing from reporting is an attempt to Make Sense of the data - unless something is horribly wrong. Hence the role of narrative techniques to support yer numbers.

An example of this is a Community of Practice healthcheck tool I have seen (and subsequently stolen). You have some basic metrics about community involvement (e.g. members joining/leaving/present, email messages posted, conference calls organised) together with some anecdote collection.

Crunch the Numbers. Tell the Story.