May be this is a little philosophical for a Monday morning but I’m going to throw it out there any way. I was just reading a Linkedin article about books that VC’s and startup CEOs recommend. One of them was preaching the importance of metrics. This caught my eye.

I work in a place where metrics are king. To the detriment of the common worker. I waste upwards of 50% of my time involved in activities designed to gather metrics(in a flawed manner) when my job is to keep the servers that make the business run up and running.

I fear that such preaching of metrics metrics metrics is really a bane in disguise. I understand we need to have a way to measure success, or failure, to have knowledge to change our processes and try to make them better but at the same time we’re all ready facing an over load of data and letting that interfere with getting actual work done is a very real thing. As I stated above it happens almost daily where I work. This is going to become a bigger and bigger problem as more and more devices and methods to gather metrics grows. Be cautious that you don’t hinder your businesses growth because your employees are spinning their wheels on metrics.

When there are to many numbers it makes it harder to chose which numbers are the important ones.

Update:

Thanks to my buddy Mike for catching this. This screen shot was taken from his Google Buzz feed. For those who may not be aware I work for the company of note.