When Google Analytics debuted in 2005, the ability to look under the hood, and see who was viewing your website (and for how long), was all at once foreign and exciting. In fact, it was so exciting there was a waitlist to access it—for nearly a year. Over a decade later, our collective obsession with metrics and analytics remains: data reigns supreme across industries with promises to improve strategic decisions.
A common trap with metrics is believing that their mere existence is strategic. Sure, the ability to track things like revenue per employee or time until promotion is enticing, but it’s not strategic if these numbers aren’t applied in ways that improve strategic value. Often, executives are satisfied with simply having HR analytics platforms—wrongly believing the numbers themselves were the “strategy.”