Performance metrics are “critically important” to business leaders, says Greg Niehaus, Professor of Finance and Insurance for the Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina. “In my view it’s very important for business functions to have metrics that tie back to the objectives of the organization – that measure the impact on value and value creation.” If a function fails to develop and effectively communicate performance metrics, says Niehaus, “their contributions to the organization will likely be not appreciated, which, in down times, could lead to cutting of responsibilities or jobs and hurting the value of the organization.”
Yet according to George Campbell, author of the book Measures and Metrics in Corporate Security and a faculty member of the Security Executive Council, “there’s a general void within security of leaders who fully appreciate the need for and the application of metrics. Too many see their incident counts as metrics, not what the analysis of those counts is telling them about risk and program performance. Security management talks about performance, but it’s almost as if they don’t think of metrics as having anything to do with performance.”