Re: Metrics for Management

Alan wrote:

> Management has a way of telling you what they THINK they want to know rather
> than what they really NEED to know.
>
> I always ask something like, "What are trying to find out?".
>
> For example, the converstaion may go like this:
>
> Mgr: How big is our database?
> DBA: What do you really want know?
> Mgr: How many mega/tera bytes of data do we have?
> DBA: What do you really want to know?
> Mgr: How many tables do we have in the database?
> DBA: What do you really want to know?
> Mgr: How many rows and columns, you know, how much data do we have?
> DBA: Why are you asking? What are you trying to determine?
> Mgr: I just need to know how much data we have.
> DBA: How are you defining data? Number of individual facts about our
> sales/inventory/service requests/.../...? Number of bytes of data, which, by
> the way, is kind of meaningless because some information is stored just to
> use it to connect to other information or identify meaning of other
> information or...etcetcetc...
> Mgr: Well, I was at a cocktail party, and the CIO at Major Competitor Inc.
> was bragging about...
> DBA: We have 5 oodlebytes.
>

Did you make it into a pie chart? So he'd understand it too?

Daniel Morgan Received on Thu Jul 18 2002 - 12:59:10 CDT