KPIs via Simulation: coolstandings

There are days when the overcommunicated concept of KPIs (key performance indicators) and Dashboards frustrate me.

Which is why I adore coolstandings.

Traditional baseball metrics combine to tell a story. Wins, losses, winning percentage, games behind the leader, runs scored, runs scored by the opposition --- all of these metrics appear on the typical baseball dashboard. Our job is to look at thirty teams, and understand what various combinations of metrics suggest.

It's easy when evaluating the Seattle Mariners. It's much harder when evaluating my beloved Milwaukee Brewers, a team that has the second best record in the National League.

Look at the column at the far right of the web page / dashboard. This metric tells the outcome of a million simulations of the remainder of the baseball season. In about fifty percent of the simulated runs, Milwaukee qualified for the playoffs.

This is all that matters --- take all of the KPIs you have on your dashboard, and TELL ME WHAT IT MEANS!!!

Those of us who are in the data mining and business intelligence arm of the online marketing, catalog marketing, retail marketing and multichannel marketing world can use this principal to our advantage --- create a unifying metric that predicts what might happen in the future, given current KPIs.