Key performance indicators (KPIs)
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measurements of the improvement or deterioration in the performance of an activity critical to the success of a business. You can use them to measure essential activities of your business so that you can see how these activities influence business results.
KPIs are typically aggregations of values across many instances, where the aggregation function can be average, maximum, minimum, sum, count (number of occurrences), or standard deviation. For example, in a call center, the timely answering of customer calls is a key business activity. A KPI could be Average time for response to a customer call for the last 30 days. This KPI could have a target of less than one minute. KPIs can also be based on expressions; for example, a Profit KPI could be a Revenue KPI minus an Expenses KPI. For cube measures, the aggregation functions also include count distinct, median, and variance.
When selecting business activities to monitor with KPIs, choose those that reflect the goals of your business, are critical to its success, and permit corrective action through early detection of problems. You can use KPIs to measure aspects of your business in relation to defined targets and sets of ranges. In Business Monitor, KPIs are compared with the target and ranges to determine the level of success.
When to use modeled KPIs vs dashboard KPIs
You can define KPIs either in the Monitor Model editor or on the Business Monitor dashboards. If you model the KPIs in the Monitor Model editor, there are some restrictions on the changes you can make in the dashboards.
- KPIs created in the model (modeled KPIs) represent the intent of the organization that authored the model. These KPIs can come from WebSphere® Business Modeler and can, therefore, carry the intent of the business owner. The KPIs that are created in the dashboards, although they can be used for the same purpose, can also be defined as needed for personal or temporary what-if analysis.
- Modeled KPIs are portable, making it simpler to deploy models with KPIs across environments.
- Modeled KPIs reduce the amount of configuration that is required after you deploy a monitor model.
- The Monitor Model editor provides access to a KPI library of typically used KPIs, categorized according to the type of process to which they apply. When you select a KPI from the library, a KPI with that name is created in the monitor model. The KPI library is based on APQC's Process Classification Framework (PCF). APQC is a member-based nonprofit organization that provides benchmarking and best practices for approximately 500 organizations worldwide in all industries. PCF organizes operating and management processes into twelve enterprise-level categories and more than 1,500 processes and associated activities. PCF provides organizations with a shared language for communicating with each other.
- The number of ranges and the IDs of those ranges cannot be changed because the trigger conditions of triggers in the model might refer to them. However, the ranges are still configurable at run time. The target and range values are treated as initial values so that they can be changed to reflect changes in business conditions.
- A target cannot be set to null at run time, again because the trigger conditions of triggers in the model might refer to it.