Following-up on his 2018 article and self-assessment tool, Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, explores how digital leaders are transforming the strategic role and purpose of key performance indicators.

Their research shows digitally sophisticated organizations have flipped traditional KPI purpose and processes inside out. Instead of seeing KPIs primarily as analytic outputs for humans, leading organizations increasingly use them as inputs for machines. Leaders rely on KPIs to train, tune, and optimize machine learning models for business impact.

Michael Schrage, “Smart Strategies Require Smarter KPIs“
MIT Sloan Management Review, September 2019

It’s time for enterprise CEOs, chief digital officers and CIOs to move beyond the transformation stage and set metrics and goals that lay out the digital business journey. This report describes the key performance indicators necessary to do so.

Digital business key performance indicators (KPIs) are designed to assess the degree of progress in becoming a digital business — which in turn leads to a change in performance that is reflected in the KPIs of the enterprise.

A first set of KPIs is required to assess the progress in digitalizing the current business model. It is possible for many areas such as sales, marketing, operations, supply chain, product/services and customer service to have digitalization goals and KPIs.

A second set of KPIs is required to assess the progress and opportunity of pursuing new digital business models. Growth, revenue, market share and margin metrics must clearly differentiate new revenue sources from nondigital ones

Digital Business KPIs: Defining and Measuring Success (Requires Subscription)
Analyst(s): Hung LeHong
03 March 2016

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and David Kiron, the executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review, partnered with Google to run a survey of more than 3,200 senior executives and interviews with 18 executives and thought leaders, them to explain how they and their organizations are using KPIs in the digital era.

Then they went a step further and published a self-assessment tool to help leaders and their teams evaluate how they measure-up against those best practices.

Article
M. Schrage and D. Kiron, “Leading With Next-Generation Key Performance Indicators”
MIT Sloan Management Review, June 2018

Self-Assessment Tool
Measure Your KPI Alignment
MIT Sloan Management Review, June 2018