management information

The Problem with Management Information

By James Lawther | July 24, 2012

My local taxi company has been taken over.  It has been bought out by Taxi-Rank Services PLC. They have started to apply big business thinking to a small business. It is a revelation. As you know, “what gets measured gets managed” so the first job, post take-over, was to apply a little science to their…

banana skin as a metaphor for KPI selection traps

When little report-production problems become a disaster

By Bernie | June 6, 2012

I’ve sat in a lot of MI (management information) departments over the years and have noticed a common theme. You can tell when there’s going to be highly visible (and embarrassing) failure in KPI and measure production well before the event. There’s a well established concept called Heinrich’s Accident Pyramid that asserts that a number near-miss events increase the probability of more…

Are your Management Information team on “mission impossible”?

By Bernie | July 18, 2011

It’s a tough and thankless job producing MI for corporations. Expectations are sky-high (you can thank Star Trek for that) and many departments deliver in spite of huge technical and logistical issues – perversely making their own lives even harder. Being so operationally focussed, it’s rare to have a chance to develop the internal-consulting skills…