Why do we measure so much? The old saw about the army "measuring it if it moves, and painting it green if it doesn't!" pretty much describes modern business approaches to intelligence gathering. "Measuring the movers" is a reality of today's business management. Six Sigma, TQM and Continuous Improvement Programs, to name a few, have resulted in an abundance, and perhaps and overabundance of measures.

Beyond the SEC-required financial measures of business health, most of our other metrics exist in a measurement fog. This lack of clarity leads managers to ignore measures because they don't know what they mean. Or, possibly worse, they attend to relatively meaningless measures because they're told to do so.

Is there no way out? How do we prioritize important measures and minimize or eliminate less important measures? The answer, quite simply, is using comprehensive business models that link such measures as operational metrics, satisfaction drivers and business performance.

Such "linkage" models rationalize and optimize the predictive value of disparate measures by focusing managers on cause and effect relationships that drive business performance. Such models consolidate these measurements into a coordinated and integrated system that provides greater business insight than the "sum of its parts," and therefore more customer management value. As such, they are a perfect complement to holistic KPI scorecards, such as the Balanced Scorecard.

CFI Group's expertise in linkage models has been proven across a wide range of product and service industries. Here are some specific benefits of linkage models compared to simple measurements:

• Relating customer survey metrics to business process improvements and outcome measures:
• Which aspects of customers' experiences drive better outcomes?
• Which process measures drive improved customer experiences?
• Differentiating relevant from irrelevant process measures:
• Focusing managers on the most critical measures
• Recapturing wasted human, capital and time resources
• Converting opportunity costs to productive customer value
• Answering critical organizational measurement questions:
• Can we optimize operational business improvements to maximize business performance?
• Can improving our internal measures better relate to customer perceptions?
• Relating employee or customer survey data to actual behavioral (financial) data:
• What actual increase in customer retention can be expected from gains in employee or customer satisfaction?
• What is the value of each point of customer satisfaction?