Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are numeric variables (usually ratios) that measure business performance. KPI are used in different very areas and perspectives like employees turnover (human resources) or conversion rate (how many visitors convert to customers) or Function Points per workday (software productivity).

Why KPI

Up to 1980 business performance was mainly restricted to financial measures. At that time ROI (Return On Investment) was king. But financial measures are not enough to measure many intangibles that will reflect on financial result on a long term.

Companies can easily improve financial results by simply cutting costs: client support, research and development, quality... Initial profit increase will later result in reduced market share, poor brand image and decreasing customer loyalty up to a possibly to irreversible situation.

For this reason large companies started to adopt a set of diversified KPIs that measure their health, the same way many different indicators (not only hearth pulse) measure human health. Now even medium sized and small companies are starting to systematically compute and analyze KPIs.

KPIs and You

If you are a business manager you probably already has some contact with KPI and balanced scorecard (most widely used approach to implement them), and possibly already implemented some of them, but, looking at other experiences can always inspire improvements.

On the other side, if your business is IT, knowing which KPIs are used or “desired” by managers will help you in planning and implementing the source of data required to compute them. This is still more important if you produce application software due to increasing popularity of KPIs.

In any case what you can possibly not know is that there are at least three online sources of KPIs on Internet that worth a visit and probably a bookmark.

Online Repositories

Here are thee free online KPI repositories you can browse and search under different categories and selection criteria. You will find many KPI definitions, interrelationships, comments and scoring. Those repositories can be useful as starting point to plan a set of KPIs that you can conveniently define for your organization as shown in a previous post.

They are listed below in their alphabetic sequence and ordering do not express any preference.

kpi-portal.com

kpilibrary.com

smartkpis.com