In 1785, an Englishman by the name of William Playfair created the first line, bar and pie charts, which he used in his Commercial and Political Atlas, published the following year.   One of his charts represented the Balance of Trade between England and the colonies, graphing exports and imports between 1770 and 1782.  Until 1773, the Balance of Trade was in England’s favor.  That changed in 1773 as a result of the Boston Tea Party.  Exports decreased dramatically because English businessmen (logically enough) did not want their unsold goods to be thrown overboard. 

The English, meanwhile, were importing more resources from the developing colonies and turning the Balance of Trade against England.  But curiously enough, the graph shows an increase in exports to the colonies after the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775, reversing the Balance of Trade to again favor England.  Why would the colonists seemingly increase their dependence on their enemy during a war? 

As it turns out, the data Mr. Playfair used to represent exports was the “total value of the cargo of ships bound for the colonies.”  While that variable may have been appropriate between 1770 and 1774, the Revolutionary War required a redefinition of the variable that never occurred.  At the start of the war, English ships bound for the colonies were loaded with war supplies for the English troops. The value of those supplies should have been deducted from the total value of the cargo to obtain a true value of the exports. Duh!

Mr. Playfair’s most glaring sin of omission was to neglect reassessing his earlier assumptions in light of a changing external environment, the Revolutionary War.  But the sin that sealed the deal was the lack of adequate documentation. Mr. Playfair identified the axis on his graph as Imports from the Colonies and Exports to the Colonies.  Today, we refer to these constructs as Key Performance Indicators (KPI). In this case, the KPI itself does not adequately define what it represents.  We need more information about what is behind the number on the chart.  The data used to describe something like a KPI are known as ‘metadata’, i.e. ‘data about data’.  The metadata needed to properly document a KPI include:

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1. The formula used to calculate the KPI
2. Information about the variables used in the KPI calculation
   • Name
   • Definition
   • Data Source
   • Collection Frequency
   • Unit of Measure

Had the metadata about Imports from the Colonies and Exports to the Colonies been more readily available to Mr. Playfair and his data consumers, the error resulting from this lack of discipline would have been revealed and corrected.

The performance measurement process is a balance of art and science.  Creativity and insight are needed to present and interpret the results.  Precision and accuracy are required to insure the integrity of the process.  If you neglect to focus adequate attention on both the science and the art of performance measurement, the entire process may be invalidated.

We’ve come a long way since Mr. Playfair’s sin of omission, but the devil is still in the details in today’s business world. It’s hard to be disciplined. It’s equally hard to re-examine assumptions (especially if they seem poured in concrete). All this requires tedious and thankless effort.  But it is that scrupulous attention to detail that separates the good from the great – and dispatches the devil to trouble someone else.

MAPPware 2.2 is now available on the mappware.com site.  Version 2.2 includes the following enhancements:

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• The organization name now appears on the top left hand corner of every screen
• Better formatting capabilities have been added to the “Message Board”
• The Environmental Scan – Internal Analysis and Environmental Scan – External Analysis screen formats now utilize the same presentation strategy.

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