Metrics
Burgess Promoting TVM

Meaningful Metrics for a Smart Society

Burgess COMMENTARY
The following was posted during the period of 'Occupy' activism in the last few months of 2011. As time goes by it becomes more and more clear that getting some effective system of metrics is absolutely key to getting decision makers to optimize what matters rather than merely to do things that are simply for ones personal agenda
Peter Burgess

Meaningful Metrics for a Smart Society

I am almost 72 ... and celebrating more than 50 years since protesting in the 1960 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) march from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square. I have been 'a couple of times round the block' as they say!. I did engineering and economics at University and qualified as a Chartered Accountant. I have been a corporate CFO and a consultant to the World Bank, IFC, UN and others over the years. I am furious at the complete mess that there is with global economic and financial metrics, and at those who have had the power to put it right but have chosen to look the other way.

Financial and economic metrics that are only about money profit, GDP growth and stock market valuations is bound to give undesirable results for society at large ... and bit by bit over a period of several decades, this has come to pass.

Since I started my career, technology is much more powerful ... I have used the phrase a 'million times more powerful', but a young friend corrected me and suggested it was more like a billion times more powerful. So the question is, why on earth is the planet in so much trouble. For a hammer, the solution is always a nail ... for me, the issue is always metrics. We need meaningful metrics that will help to get resources allocated where they are going to do the most good ... metrics about people and quality of life to supplement those about organizations and money. A lot of people have done bits of this work ... it is not my unique idea.

We also need to have dataflows that are independent of the entities that are responsible for economic activities. it is quality of life in a (physical) community that matters, with the organizations subsidiary to the community and not the other way round.

I am calling this TrueValueMetrics ... and am convinced that if we start measuring the right things, we will get the right results. In my own little way, I have been committed to the idea of 'Open' movements for a long time ... and this should be, in my view, the way forward for the metrics I am thinking about.

Peter Burgess

Trevor Lee

I heard a discussion related to this the other day in regards to how unemployment data is presented. Depending on how you slice it, the numbers can show very different things - I think a key is clarity in terms of how the numbers are arrived at, and sadly, this requires a level of discipline and personal fortitude on the part of the reader in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the figures. The tendency towards consuming content in bite-sized pieces is not doing us any favors in terms of overcoming these issues on a deep level.
POSTED 11.07.11