THE TWIGSTER

Measure - Anything that is measured. Ex: No.of customers, Total Revenue etc. Key thing is that there is nothing inherently good or bad with a measure. The only thing of interest in a measure is how was it measured?

Metric - A value typically derived by a combination of two or more measures. Ex: Financial Ratios, Total Revenue over time etc. Metrics do provide the notion of whether the values are good or bad and also helps in benchmarking.

KPI - Probably the most important to BI practitioners as it brings in the business context. Metrics within a particular organizational or industry context are KPIs.

A KPI is simply a metric that is tied to a target. Most often a KPI represents how far a metric is above or below a pre-determined target. KPI’s usually are shown as a ratio of actual to target and are designed to instantly let a business user know if they are on or off their plan without the end user having to consciously focus on the metrics being represented. For instance, we might decide that in order to hit our quarterly sales target we need to be selling $10,000 of widgets per week. The metric would be widget sales per week; the target would be $10,000. If we used a percentage gauge visualization to represent this KPI and we had sold $8,000 in widgets by Wednesday, the user would instantly see that they were at 80% of their goal. When selecting targets for your KPI’s you need to remember that a target will have to exist for every grain you want to view within a metric. Having a dashboard that displays a KPI for gross sales by day, week, and month will require that you have identified targets for each of these associated grains.