Blog: David Loshin

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Modeling Metrics

As a by-product of some of our current activities in data governance, I was interested in looking at ways that people model performance metrics. Interestingly, half an hour's worth of web searching turned up surprisingly few artifacts that describe ways to model a performance metric. Perhaps my search term vocabulary is artificially limited to the phrases I believe should provide some hits, since I am confident that every BI tool vendor has embedded models for performance metrics.

However, the failed search exercise has triggered the dreaded next step: having to think about it myself. My first thoughts revolve around "metric basics":

- who are the stakeholders,
- what are the performance objectives,
- what is being measured,
- what are the units of measure,
- how is the measurement performed,
- how often is the measurement done,
- is the measurement process automated or manual,
- how is the result reported,
- how are individual measurements rolled up into more comprehensive scores,
- what are the benchmark values,
- what are the critical thresholds,
- who is notified of a low score,
- how are issues forwarded into the issues tracking system.

Any other suggestions?

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