The Tyranny of Metrics

by Jerry Z. Muller

6. What are the costs of acquiring the metrics? Information is never free, and often it is expensive in ways that rarely occur to those who demand more of it. Collecting data, processing it, analyzing it—all of these take time, and their expense is in the opportunity costs of the time put into them. To put it another way, every moment you or your colleagues or employees are devoting to the production of metrics is time not devoted to the activities being measured. If you’re a data analyst, of course, producing metrics is your primary activity. For everyone else, it’s a distraction. So, even if the performance measurements are worth having, their worth may be less than the costs of obtaining them. Remember, too, that those costs in human time and effort are themselves almost impossible to calculate—another reason to err on the side of caution.