"Measuring things just to be measuring them is just plain dumb."

Agreed. You often see this in statistical returns sent to parent
organisations, governments etc, where over time, the forms get more and
more cluttered because someone somewhere says "wouldn't it be nice to know
. . . "

I once saw a small stocktaking team in an unnamed very large library in
Canberra have one person (out of I think five) full time "doing the
stats". Apart from the sheer stupidity of stocktaking a library that
large, most of the metrics were simply to feed 'interesting' metrics about
the collections to senior management. Some ended up in pretty little
graphs in the annual report. Hardly any were used to manage the work of
the team, or even to manage the collections. It ended up taking more than
a week to compile the weekly stats! Fortunately a severe government
staffing cutback eventually resulted in the team being disbanded
altogether. It could have been avoided from the start by a firm response
along risk and cost effectiveness lines to an audit report.

If you don't use a metric, regularly, for something practical, stop
collecting it!


Glenn

Glenn Sanders MRMA
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These views are mine alone. They may or may not be those of any
previous or present employers or clients. I don't know. If I'd asked
and they'd agreed, I would have signed it "Bloggs and Co and
Glenn". Or whatever. But I haven't, so I didn't.

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