In the “Ecology of Metrics,” I wrote about “alignment” being a type of metric; alignment can measure the extent to which an organization’s supply or capacity is matched against the demands or needs of the market.  For instance, in a call centre, it would be highly desirable to have agents available to respond to calls at “precisely” the same time that clients are making calls.  If alignment is off even by only 15 to 30 seconds, impatient clients might hang up and never call again.  Similarly…

The term “technical analysis” usually refers to the study of stock prices.  A technical analyst might use real-time or closing prices of stocks to predict future prices.  This is an interesting concept because of what is normally excluded from the analysis - namely, everything except prices.  Given that the approach doesn’t necessarily consider the health or profitability of the underlying companies, a purely technical approach seems to offer guidance that is disconnected from reality.  Yet…

In general, any expression of performance that applies to a department can, if the data system is configured properly, be stated in relation to individual workers.  For instance, if # of sales contracts / # of customer enquiries = success rate, the success rate can be given for the entire dealership and also for each sales agent in that dealership.  Due to the differences in performance between agents, it can be problematic to only make use of the aggregate.  Some agents might be blamed for…

Inbound and content marketing are not going anywhere anytime soon. The content marketing association reports that over 90% of both enterprise B2B and B2C companies are using the tactic. There are a million different ways to leverage content strategy, and here at TechnologyAdvice, we’ve experimented with plenty of them. It’s been a fun, albeit, educational experience to say the…