The Problem with Metrics Nobody Uses

Leveraging ITIL Principles to Clean Up Your Dashboards and Transform Data into Actionable Insights

September 22, 2026

Yurguen Penaranda Thomas

Introduction: The Report Nobody Read

“What gets measured gets improved.” This phrase, frequently attributed to Peter Drucker, has been one of the main drivers encouraging organizations to recognize the importance of measurement, whether for control purposes, tracking objectives, or identifying improvement opportunities.

However, what happens when the following situation occurs? Every month, the organization generates many reports and updates several dashboards. Yet days later, nobody analyzed the results presented in those reports or dashboards, nor has a single decision been made based on them.

The creation of reports and dashboards requires hours of work, technological infrastructure, and storage resources. All of this represents a cost to the organization. If that information is never used to analyze situations or support decision-making, the effort ultimately delivers little or no value.

This means that the organization is investing resources month after month in something that provides no value. In this case, the problem is not the lack of metrics. The problem is that indicators exist solely to fulfill an activity rather than to support decisions.

The Obsession with Measuring

Although the phrase introduced earlier has encouraged a culture of measurement, it is sometimes mistakenly interpreted as “everything must be measured.” This interpretation can lead to actions such as the constant creation of new indicators and the failure to review existing ones to identify KPIs that are no longer relevant. As a result, the list of indicators continues to grow, leading to increasingly complex dashboards that are difficult to interpret quickly. These tools eventually become so difficult to read that people prefer to ignore them and manually calculate their own parallel indicators.

Maturity is not demonstrated by the number of indicators an organization has, but by its ability to transform information into decisions.

When an Indicator Becomes Bureaucracy

A new indicator may be created for a variety of reasons. For example, it may have been requested to satisfy a regulatory or audit requirement, or it may have been created for a specific project and later considered important enough to continue measuring. There are also indicators that were useful long ago but are no longer relevant yet continue to be measured simply because “they have always been measured.”

Over time, it may happen that nobody remembers why an indicator was created, nobody analyzes its results, and no actions are taken based on them. Yet the indicator continues to be calculated out of habit.

This demonstrates that an indicator that does not generate decisions eventually becomes just another administrative activity.

The Hidden Cost of Useless Metrics

It is easy to assume that indicators are free. They require both human and technological effort, creating a cost associated with their calculation.

Time Invested

Employees must dedicate time to activities such as data extraction, data consolidation and validation, report production, and the creation, configuration, and updating of dashboards. If the organization analyzed how many hours are invested each month and how many people participate in these tasks, it could calculate the total cost associated with employee salaries.

An indicator that does not generate actions consumes resources that could be used for activities that provide greater value.

Administrative Overload

In addition to the associated costs, these activities require certain employees to spend significant amounts of time each month on tasks such as manually updating indicators, preparing executive presentations, and attending report review meetings.

An excessive number of indicators can create bureaucracy, where people spend more time feeding the measurement system than actually managing services. In these situations, the organization may end up investing more effort in reporting performance than in improving performance.

Distraction

When faced with a report or dashboard containing a large number of indicators, people can become overwhelmed. It becomes difficult to identify which indicators are the most important, difficult to analyze the data, and difficult to draw conclusions. In some cases, it may even become difficult to maintain attention.

What is truly important gets lost among the overwhelming amount of information available for review and analysis. This demonstrates that measuring too many things can be just as harmful as measuring nothing at all.

False Sense of Control

Some organizations may believe that having extensive reports and visually appealing dashboards filled with indicators and charts means they have control over their operations and the achievement of their goals.

However, information is only valuable when it is analyzed and used to make decisions.

Calculating Inconsistent Alternative Metrics

Due to the distraction created by overly complex reports and dashboards, some users may eventually give up trying to find the information they need and instead calculate the indicators they require independently.

This can create duplicate work, since multiple parties are producing the same indicators. In addition, it can lead to inconsistencies in the data, because different teams may use slightly different parameters when calculating indicators. This can produce conflicting results and raise an important question: Which indicator contains the correct result?

Automating the Unnecessary

As mentioned earlier, producing reports and dashboards requires employees to invest significant time in data extraction, indicator calculation, and report generation, especially when these information assets are produced primarily through manual processes.

One option an organization may choose is to automate these activities. For example, if generating a report manually takes eight hours per month, automation may reduce that effort to only ten seconds per month.

This may appear to be a major improvement, since the employee can now dedicate those eight hours to other activities. However, if nobody analyzes the automated report, was it necessary to automate it? The answer is no. The proper approach would have been to perform a value stream analysis of the process and identify that the report no longer provides any value, eliminating the report-generation activity altogether.

Although a person may no longer need to spend time generating the report, the automation itself was not free of costs. Someone likely invested many hours understanding the requirements, designing the automation, implementing it, performing testing, and maintaining it over time. There are also costs associated with the processing required to generate the report automatically and the storage required to retain both the report and its historical versions.

All of these costs could have been avoided if the reporting activity had been eliminated from the beginning.

The Question Every Organization Should Ask

There is one key question every organization should ask to determine whether an indicator truly provides value: What decision would change if this indicator changed tomorrow? If the answer is: “No decision would change.”, then the indicator probably does not provide value.

Other useful questions include: Who uses this metric? How frequently is it used? What actions does it generate? What risks would arise if it stopped being measured?

How to Identify Metrics That Do Not Add Value

When an organization measures a large number of indicators, it can be difficult to establish criteria for determining whether a measurement still adds value or whether it would be more appropriate to stop calculating it.

In addition to the questions presented above, the following warning signs may indicate that an indicator is no longer generating value:

· Nobody reviews the indicator during meetings.

· It does not generate corrective actions.

· It does not have a clearly assigned owner.

· It is automatically produced but never consulted.

· Nobody questions its results.

· It has not been reviewed for years.

· Similar or duplicate metrics exist.

· Users do not know its purpose.

If any of these signals are detected during an indicator value analysis, the process owner should be consulted to perform a more detailed assessment and determine whether the indicator can be discontinued without creating adverse impacts.

What ITIL Is Really Trying to Promote

Management Practices That Consume Indicators

Indicators related to ITSM are generated as outputs of ITIL management practices. However, some management practices specifically consume indicators as part of their activities. Therefore, identifying which practice or practices should use a particular indicator and then validating whether that is happening is an objective way of determining the relevance of that indicator.

The following ITIL management practices are among the most significant consumers of indicators generated by other practices:

· Continual Improvement This is probably the largest consumer of ITSM metrics. It receives measurements from nearly all other practices in order to identify improvement opportunities, prioritize initiatives, establish the current state, evaluate implemented improvements, and verify whether expected outcomes have been achieved. If indicators do not contribute to defining improvement actions, they are probably not generating value.

· Risk Management This is a cross-functional practice that consumes indicators from other practices to identify early warning signs of risk and proactively establish measures that either reduce the likelihood of occurrence or mitigate potential impacts. As a result, many indicators should help anticipate risks rather than merely report historical results.

· Problem Management This practice primarily consumes incident management indicators to identify recurring incidents, the most affected services, incident costs, time between incidents, and other related indicators. By analyzing these indicators, the organization can identify which types of incidents require root cause analysis in order to prevent recurrence. If nobody uses incident data to identify recurring problems, the measurement loses much of its value.

· Service Level Management This practice consumes service operation metrics to verify whether SLA targets are being met. Typical indicators include: Availability, Capacity, Response time and Resolution time. Many organizations generate SLA measurements every month without those metrics triggering any improvement actions.

· Capacity and Performance Management This practice uses indicators to determine whether services have sufficient resources, both technical and human, to deliver agreed performance levels. Metrics commonly analyzed include: Resource utilization, Demand growth, Consumption trends and Available capacity. Based on these indicators, the organization can determine whether additional resources are needed or whether existing resources can be optimized.

· Workforce and Talent Management This practice analyzes workforce-related indicators such as: Employee turnover, Achievement of individual work objectives, Employee satisfaction, Overtime hours and Training hours. Analyzing these indicators helps organizations make decisions related to workplace climate, skills development, management capabilities, and workforce coverage requirements.

ITIL does not promote metrics as an end in themselves. Measurements exist to support practices that make decisions, manage risks, identify improvement opportunities, and understand service performance. When indicators stop influencing those practices, they cease to be management tools and become nothing more than reports.

Using Guiding Principles to Assess Indicator Relevance

ITIL 4 introduced the Guiding Principles, which are reinforced in ITIL Version 5. These are seven universal recommendations designed to guide decision-making and service management while promoting agility and value creation.

Applying these principles can facilitate effective indicator management.

· Focus on Value As discussed throughout this article, every indicator should provide value to the organization in some way, whether through objective tracking, regulatory compliance, customer perception, or improvement identification. If nobody can explain why an indicator exists, that is a strong sign that it may no longer be relevant.

· Start Where You Are Before creating a new indicator, organizations should review existing indicators. It may turn out that the desired indicator already exists under a different name, or that a similar one can be adapted with minor changes to achieve the same objective.

· Collaborate and Promote Visibility Creating and maintaining an indicator catalog should be a collaborative effort. This helps ensure that indicators are genuinely valuable to stakeholders. It also ensures that indicators reach the people who can use them for decision-making, while reducing duplicate measurements generated by different teams.

· Keep It Simple and Practical Measuring more indicators do not necessarily mean having greater control. In fact, the opposite may be true. When too many indicators are measured, people may lose sight of which ones truly matter and how to interpret them. Following this principle, it is generally preferable to define a small number of indicators for each process, provided they genuinely deliver value. This reduces maintenance effort and makes interpretation and decision-making significantly easier.

· Optimize and Automate In line with the previous principle, automation should not be the first step. The first step should be cleaning up the indicator inventory by removing indicators that do not provide value or that duplicate existing measurements. Only then should organizations consider implementing Business Intelligence tools to automate updates, reduce effort, and minimize human error in manual calculations.

Conclusion

Measurement is important, but measuring is not the objective. The purpose of measurement is to support decisions based on data rather than simple perceptions. Among its many benefits, measurement enables organizations to track objectives and identify opportunities for improvement.

A mature organization is not the one that generates the most indicators. It is the one that transforms information into decisions and decisions into improvements. Metrics have value only when they help organizations understand reality, guide actions, and produce results. Otherwise, they become reports that nobody reads and efforts that nobody takes advantage of.

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