Week1.2-区分传统和动态商业指标Business Metrics

传统的商业指标Traditional Business Metrics

包含标准的财务和管理会计类型，例如关于净现金流、损益情况的季度财报，以及例如股东权益等资产负债表上的变化。
include standard financial and managerial accounting categories, such as quarterly statements of net cash flow, profits and losses, and changes to balance sheet items such as shareholder’s equity.

传统的商业指标最早起源于使用纸笔形式的事实报告，其中的某些指标曾经也是很有创新性的。比如500年前，意大利佛伦伦萨的银行家就创造了复式记账的方法。基于这些商业指标做出的商业决策通常是经过数月甚至数年的深思熟虑才做出的。
Traditional business metrics have their origins primarily in paper and pencil after the fact reporting. Some of these metrics were once innovative too, like 500 years ago, when bankers in Florence, Italy invented double entry book keeping. Business decisions, that might be made based on these metrics, will happen usually after long deliberation, sometimes on a scale of months to years.

由于时间不够，我们需要定义清晰的动态商业指标，以便在时间紧急的情况下进行沟通。这些指标能够正确指出问题：在目前的商业流程中我们可以立刻做出哪些改变来增加收入、提高利润或者降低风险。
They remain extremely important and worth of our study, but we just don’t have time for that. We want Dynamic Business Metrics that are defined and can be communicated in a manner that conveys urgency. Metrics that address the right question: what change in our business processes can we make right now to increase revenues, maximize profitability, or reduce risk?

动态的商业指标Dynamic Business Metrics

动态的商业指标具有两个特点：
Two attributes make a business metric dynamic.
1. 在一个月甚至更短的周期内发生显著的变化。
First, will the metric change significantly over intervals of a month or less?
例如商场里一间独立的零售店基于三年的固定资产租约支付每月的租金，当然是和其效率和利润有关的商业指标，但它却不是动态的商业指标，因为它不会时刻变动，所以没有理由追踪它。
For example, the monthly rent a stand alone retail store in a mall pays on its three-year real estate lease is of course a business metric related to its efficiency and profitability, but it is not a dynamic business metric. There’s no point in tracking it because it won’t change anytime soon.
但从另一方面说，如果是一家拥有1000家门店的全国连锁零售商，平均每周有7家店自行谈判并签订三年的租约，那么就可以并且应该追踪新的租约中每平方英尺的租金，并将其做为一项重要的动态指标，而不只是一项设立目标并追踪其进展的指标。
On the other hand, if a national retail chain with 1,000 mall-based stores is individually negotiating and signing an average of about seven new three-year leases each week, it can and should track average monthly rent per square foot on new real estate leases as an important dynamic metric, against which to set goals and track progress.

2. 公司采取的具体的措施是否可以在短期内显著影响该指标，并且该影响是可见的。
Second, are their specific actions the company can take that can visibly or significantly impact the metric in the short term?

一项指标是否是动态指标同样取决于商业内容。
Whether the metric is dynamic, may also depend on the business context.

例如我们刚才提到的那1000家连锁商店 并不是新开张或关闭，而只是基于目前的面积和之前合同里事先商定的条款进行延期，那么对于平均每月每平方英尺的租金就没有太大的影响。而另一方面，如果这家连锁零售商公开宣布将关闭其美国境内的25%的店面，正如2015年6月份GAP关掉25%的零售店，那就需要和房东进行沟通：要么维持到目前的租约结束，接下来房东需要新找一个租客，新的租客可能不会付和目前一样多的租金；或者双方现在就来重新商谈新的租约。
For example, if the 1,000 store retail chain we just mentioned is neither adding nor closing stores and is simply renewing leases on current space, where the old leases had pre-negotiated terms to be extended, It will be difficult to make much impact on the average monthly rent per square foot. On the other hand, if that retail chain publicly announces that it is going to close 25% of its US retail stores, as the GAP chain did in June of 2015, it may be able to go back to landlords with the proposition, either we leave at the end of the current lease and you’ll need to find a new tenant, if you can, who may not pay as much per square foot as we do. Or let’s renegotiate our lease terms now.

在这个案例中，对于GAP而言新的租约中每平方英尺的平均租金将是一项动态的指标，这就是一个他们可以节省成本的地方。这就是为什么立刻宣布坏消息通常是一项好的商业策略。
In this case, the average monthly rent per square foot for newly renegotiated leases would be a dynamic metric for the GAP. It’s a place they could save money. This is why announcing all your bad news at once is often a good business strategy.

另外我们要重点关注：一项商业上的变化能在多大程度上影响指标。如果这项指标为噪音数据，太多的东西可以影响它，频繁变动，说明它对于我们采取的措施非常敏感。
How much impact a business change can have on the metric, is another important thing that we need to observe. If the metric is noisy, then lots of things are affecting it. If its twitchy, that means it’s very specifically offended by what we’re doing.

传统的指标例如季度收益会被许多不同的因素影响，其中许多因素完全不受我们业务的控制。我们新投放市场的大型广告活动可能完全不会体现在季度的收益指标中，因为事实上我们大多数的客户是基于长期合同拥有很长购买周期的政府中介机构。
Traditional metrics, like quarterly revenues, are impacted by dozen of different factors, many of which are completely outside the control of our business. The great new advertising campaign that we launched may not even show up in quarterly revenue metrics if, in fact, most of our customers are government agencies on long-term contracts with a very long sales cycle.

总收入通常只是一项汇总的数， 正如在kissmetrics网站上所说的，汇总数据从某种程度上毫无价值，动态的指标是经常变化，我们流程中的小小的调整都会产生很大的影响。例如在线购物时将商品加入购物车并且最终实现购买的比例，和页面下载的平均时间是息息相关的。研究表明如果页面加载时间长于3秒，最终购买将少于页面加载速度小于3秒的情况，40%的网站访问者将完全放弃购买，如果一个页面没有在3秒内加载。这就是为什么会有边缘缓存的行业存在。正如Akamai公司提供的内容分发网络服务，零售商们付费在本地存储网站内容，从物理距离上更接近世界各地的客户，从而能够节省网页下载中宝贵的1至2秒种时间。
Total revenues is always an aggregate number, and as they say on the Kissmetrics website, aggregate data is kind of worthless. Dynamic metrics are twitchy. Small changes in process, in our process, can lead to big impact. For example the percentage of people who will fill an online shopping cart and take their shopping cart all the way to purchase is extremely sensitive to average page load times. Studies have shown that pages that load in three or more seconds are much less likely to lead to sales than pages that load in less than three seconds. 40% of web users will abandon completely, a web page that does not load in three seconds. This is why there’s an entire industry devoted to what’s called edge caching. Content delivery networks, like Akamai, that retail stores pay to store copies of their websites locally, physically near their customers around the world, saving a precious second or two in load times.

另外杜克大学学生的一个项目是监控公司的网站运行表现，我们发现许多零售公司在移动设备上的网页下载需要20秒甚至更多的时间，它表明许多全球性的零售公司并没有在世界各地测试其网页在移动设备上的下载速度。如果你的公司还没有在活跃的全球市场上测试移动设备的网页下载速度，那么你们应该尽快开始。
By the way, through a recent project my students at Duke did for a website performance monitoring company, we learned that on mobile devices many retails companies’ web pages are taking 20 seconds or more to load. It appears that many global retail companies do not yet test their mobile based loading times from remote locations around the world. If your company does not already do load time performance testing for mobile devices in all global markets where it is active, It should start immediately.