Source: Pingdom, 2010
References
Pingdom (2010), Google facts and figures (massive infographic), available at http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/24/google-facts-and-figures-massive-infographic/ (accessed on 29 March 2010)
With an estimated number of 122.566 establishments of all kinds (public, academic and school libraries) only in the Unites States (American Library Association, 2010), the public library sector is of major importance for the long-term development of the mankind, collecting and making available for use valuable sources of information people need and use in all-related aspects of life.
Performance measurement in the public library sector has a long history. An important event was the establishment of the EQUINOX project , a European-wide initiative, funded by the Telematics for Libraries Program (from the European Commission). Launched in 1998, it aimed to expand the traditional performance measures with indicators for the electronic library environment, on one hand and, on the other hand, develop an integrated tool for quality management and performance measurement addressing library managers’ needs. This initiative emerged from the conclusions of former projects that outlined the need to support managers of hybrid (traditional & electronic) libraries, from a more flexible performance measurement and quality management perspective that was the ISO 9002.
However, by 2004, at the time of the World Summit on the Information Society, the Statistics and Evaluation section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) website still did not establish a set of “robust” global library statistics. To address this need a Global library statistics development initiative was put in place (Ellis, Heaney, Meunier, Poll, 2009) and several “core indicators” were identified, focusing on five levels:
Along with these macro initiatives, individual libraries have their own performance measurement efforts. Why should they focus on that? Because of at least three reasons:
Today, there is an vast amount of indicators used as part of library performance measurement initiatives. Some are constructed using different standards and formats, so measures vary from one type of library to another, depending on the nature of operations (national library, school library etc.). Others are generic and can be used in any kind of library institution.
In the case of the latter ones, the international standard ISO 11620 “Library performance indicators” describes a number of 45 indicators addressing issues relevant to nearly all types of libraries, such as (Poll, 2008):
These general indicators are complemented by several performance measures that reflect the situation at national level (and can be used in the case of national libraries):
An important aspect in the library’s activity is the digitization, important for at least two reasons: it makes the heritage collections universally available and it allows the conservation of the original material by making available a digital surrogate (Poll, 2008). An example of a digitization performance measure is the % Documents digitized per special collection.
For a list of library KPI examples visit: http://www.smartkpis.com/kpi/industries/arts-and-culture/libraries-and-archives/
To see some of these performance measures employed in practice, you can visit the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Netherlands and the British Library pages in KPIs in practice section of http://www.smartKPIs.com.
American Library Association (2010), “Number of Libraries in the Unites States Fact Sheet”, available at: http://www.ala.org/ala/professionalresources/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet01.cfm (accessed 26 March 2010).
Ellis, S., Heaney, M., Meunier, P., Poll. R. (2009), “Global Library Statistics”, IFLA Journal, Vol. 35 No. 2, pp. 123-130.
Poll, R. (2008), “The cat’s pyjamas? Performance indicators for national libraries”, Performance Measurement and Metrics, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 110-117.
Who is the best driver in the world?
With a wide variety of motorsport competitions in place around the world, this is one of the questions that started many passionate debates, staying for many years on the lips of millions of motorsport fans. Today, Castrol Driver Rankings provides all motorsport fans with a powerful and objective tool for assessing driver’s performance and determine who the best driver in the world is. According with the current rankings, the Castrol Driver Dynamic Table is topped by Jenson Button followed by Sebastian Vettel and Sebastien Loeb.
Source: www.castroldriverrankings.com, 2010
What is Castrol Driver Rankings?
The Castrol Driver Rankings is developed by a panel of experts and measures every aspect of a driver individual performance in each event they participate at, taking in consideration world’s top 2000 drivers from 47 Championships and more than 650 race events. Among the most important Championships analyzed are Formula1, NASCAR or World Rally Car. However competitions such as World Touring Car Championship, Le Mans Series or IndyCar Series are not missed out.
How is Castrol Driver Rankings measured ?
The points in the Castrol Ranking Dynamic Lead Table are rewarded based only on the drivers recorded performance results in the qualifying rounds and race and takes in consideration measures such as:
# Fastest lap time
# Laps lead
# Positions gained / lost, or
# Race consistency
To ensure an objective ranking across all competitions the points won by each driver are adjusted according with the importance of the competition and number of events held. Being updated on a weekly basis the Castrol Ranking ensures that fans know at any given point in time who is the best driver in the world. Fans can also follow the Castrol Edge Performer category in order to review how their favorite drivers performed on a monthly basis.
Do you want to find out more?
View the Castrol Driver Rankings video presentation below, or visit the official Castrol Rankings website for complete facts and analysis.
Additional resources
References
The previous update explored the historic journey of using red, yellow and green for performance management signaling. It illustrated how red and green traffic lights were initially used in railway signaling and gradually adopted for road traffic management. Yellow was added to the traffic light in 1920, about 50 years after the first traffic light was introduced. William Potts, a Detroit Traffic Police Superintendent designed the first 4-way, 3 color traffic light.
Yellow was introduced to signal a “caution” interval, warning of an upcoming signal change from either red to green or green to red. It was required to command greater attention from motorists as speed in intersections increased and the breaking required more time and advance notice (Lamm, 2010). Yellow is a high visibility color that works well with road traffic signaling and is well positioned half way between the red and green light spectrum.
Gradually red, yellow and green signaling started to be used in business environments, to signal stock prices variances (red and green) and variations in performance reports. Besides their light wavelength properties, there are additional meanings and properties that popular culture and research associated with these colors.
In performance management, the meaning of these colors are:
When using such performance variance intervals, an important aspect that needs to be addressed before reporting is the values for each interval. What value of results “makes” them yellow or red? The steps to be followed are:
For qualitative measures, the performance variance intervals are defined by establishing what performance standards are required for each of the colors illustrating performance results.
The use of colors has thousands of years of tradition, however in terms of business and performance reporting, perhaps we are still in the early stages of working with color. Nevertheless, color enhances performance reports and with an increase emphasis on data visualization, it is just a matter of time until innovations in this area will start to emerge. After all it took over 50 years to add a new color to road traffic light signaling.
Stay smart! Enjoy smartKPIs.com!
Aurel Brudan
Performance Architect,
Lamm W., 2010, History of Traffic Signal Design, available online at: http://www.kbrhorse.net/signals/history01.html Accessed on 26 March 2010.
According to a report from global information services company Experian Hitwise, Facebook visitors are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from News.Google.com. “In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook.com users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook.com compared to 64% for Google News.”
The KPIs used in this report were:
Heather Hopkins, Senior Online Analyst at Hitwise, uses the following example: ” 81% of visits to CNN.com in the week to March 6, 2010 were returning visitors while 84% of visitors to CNN.com that came from Facebook.com were returning visitors and 72% from Google News were returning visitors.”
According to Hitwise, in most cases, Google.com is the first source of traffic to these sites. However, visitors from Google are less likely to be returning visitors than average for either Google News or Facebook.
The KPIs used for measuring performance of a website can make the difference when concluding if the website is successful or not. Therefore, selecting the most relevant performance indicators is a very important process.
smartKPIs.com offers specific performance indicators examples for this area in the Library of KPI examples for Online Presence.
References:
Experian Hotwise (2010), Facebook Visitors Come Back Again and Again, available at http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2010/03/facebook_visitors_come_back_ag.html (accessed 22nd March 2010)
smartKPIs.com (2010), “KPI examples for the Online presence”, available at http://www.smartkpis.com/kpi/functional-areas/online-presence-ecommerce/ (accessed 15 March 2010).
In the second week of March 2010, Facebook surpassed Google in the US and became the most visited website for the week, according to a report from Experian Hitwise, a global information services company. Facebook accounted for 7.07 % of all Web traffic in the United States in that week, while Google accounted for 7.03 % of all traffic. This marks the first time Facebook has posted a weekly traffic volume over Google.
On a daily basis, Facebook overtook Google on 3 previous occasions prior to the weekend of March 6th and 7th 2010: on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day 2009.
The market share of visits to www.Facebook.com increased 185% during March 7-13, as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to www.Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Facebook totaled 400 million worldwide users as of February, up from 200 million in April 2009.
The Key Performance Indicators that were used for the ranking done by Experian Hitwise are:
For more performance indicators in this area, visit the Library of KPI examples for Online Presence.
References:
Experian Hotwise (2010), Facebook Reaches Top Rankings in US, available at http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2010/03/facebook_reaches_top_ranking_i.html (accessed 22nd March 2010)
smartKPIs.com (2010), “KPI examples for the Online presence”, available at http://www.smartkpis.com/kpi/functional-areas/online-presence-ecommerce/ (accessed 15 March 2010).
“The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2010” report was recently published by Fast Company. It reports analyzes over 250 companies, including more than 75 non-U.S. businesses, and emphasizes the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies. In addition to the Top 50, Fast Company cited 59 Innovation All-stars, culled from past Top 50 honorees, plus ranked the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in 24 categories, including advertising and marketing, biotechnology, film and TV, media, music, and sports.
Below is a snapshot of the top presented by Fast Company.
What lacks in this report is the means by which the selection and ranking was generated. There are no indicators or criteria of company’s selection, making the validity of the rankings questionable. However, this raises several important questions:
At organizational level, measuring performance in innovation is commonly done through a variety of metrics, many of them listed in the library of KPI examples available on www.smartKPIs.com:
Another example of report regarding innovation performance, this time at national level, is “The Innovation Capacity Index”, presented in a previous blog post. The report contains the 2009-2010 Innovation Capacity Index rankings of 131 countries, and the factors that were taken into consideration while creating the ranking.
References
smartKPIs.com (2010), “KPI examples for Knowledge and Innovation Functional Area, Innovation subcategory”, available at http://www.smartkpis.com/kpi/functional-areas/knowledge-and-innovation/innovation/ (accessed 21 March 2010).
smartKPIs.com (2010), “The Innovation Capacity Index” blog post, available at http://www.smartkpis.com/blog/2010/01/17/the-innovation-capacity-index/ (accessed 21 March 2010)
FastCompany.com (2010), “The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2010”, available at http://www.fastcompany.com/mic/2010 (accessed 21 March 2010)
Evaluating city livability is an important aspect of local government performance management. One of the most popular approaches is the one used by the Economist Intelligence Unit in preparing the “Quality of Life Ranking”.
Source: Economist Intelligence Unit
The Economist Intelligence Unit “Quality of Life Ranking” report evaluates living conditions in 140 cities from around the world. The Quality of Life Index calculated for each evaluated city is based on both quantitative and qualitative data gathered for over 30 indicators which are grouped in 5 individually weighted categories:
1. Stability (25%): i.e. threat of terrorism, threat of military conflict
2. Healthcare (20%): i.e. availability of public and private healthcare, availability of medicines
3. Culture and environment (25%): i.e. level of corruption and censorship, availability of consumer goods and services
4. Education (10%): i.e. availability of private education
5. Infrastructure (20%) i.e. quality of road network, quality of energy and water provision, quality of telecommunication infrastructure
Each indicator is rated between one and five, where one means that there is no reduction in quality of life and five means the quality of life is extremely challenging.
General ratings for the whole Index are between 0% and 100%, where 0% means that the quality of life is intolerable and 100% is exceptional.
Additional resources
smartkpis.com (eab group, 2010) provides its users with a comprehensive library of KPIs from different industries, some of them with direct correspondence to the categories used by the Economist Intelligence Unit Quality of Life report:
References:
As in all human communication, content and format go hand in hand to deliver a communication message. The content of performance reports only partially addresses communication requirements. Packaging quality content in well formatted reports ensures the message is not only delivered, but the process of receiving, interpreting and understanding is maximized.
Color plays an important part in performance reporting. It fulfills a signaling function, delivering key messages in an efficient and effective manner.
Red, yellow and green are the main colors used today for signaling variance from performance expectations. But it hasn’t always been this way.
Going back in history until the early 1800s, when the first performance appraisals started to be used by companies, we come across a different set of colors. Robert Owen is reported to have initiated the formal appraisals of individual performance management at his cotton mills in Scotland. His “silent monitors” were wooden blocks painted with different colors on each visible side and placed above the work station of each employee (George, 1972; Banner & Cooke, 1984). The color coding was as follows:
A key development in the history of color coding in performance management was the invention of traffic lights as traffic management systems. Not surprisingly, the industrial revolution and introduction of railways was the catalyst for this invention. John Peake Knight, an engineer working as railway manager is credited as the inventor of world’s first traffic lights, erected in the City of Westminster on the 9th of December 1868 (BBC, 2010). The exact location is reported to be at the intersection of George and Bridge Streets, near London’s House of Commons. The purpose of the traffic light was to direct the traffic of horse drawn carriages and pedestrians, as automobiles arrived in the United Kingdom towards the end of the 19th century. A railway semaphore system was used during the day – with an arm was placed in a horizontal or angled position signaling whether vehicles could pass or not. Gas powered red and green lights were used at night. The color selection was inspired by their use by the railway system.
Red and green signaling is still in use today in railways transportation, aviation and seafaring. It appears the reason for their selection as signaling colors is the wavelength of their light. In railways and shipping, detecting light color from the distance is important as stopping is not as fast as for cars or horse carriages. Lights with higher wavelength are preferred in signaling due to their high visibility.
“Visible light” corresponds to a wavelength range of 400 – 700 nanometers (nm). Outside of this spectrum we have ultraviolet radiation and infrared radiation. The white light is a mixture of the colors of the visible spectrum, while black is total absence of light.
Red light has the highest wavelength of any color: 650 nm. At sunrise and sunset, red or orange colors are present because the wavelengths associated with these colors are less efficiently scattered by the atmosphere than the shorter wavelength colors (e.g., blue and purple). (NASA, 2007). Due to its high wavelength, red is considered to be the color with the highest visibility from distance and the perfect candidate for signaling.
Orange light has a wavelength of 590 nm while yellow light 570 nm, both relatively close to red light, so they were eliminated due to the fact that they don’t offer a high enough contrast.
The next candidate was green light, with a wavelength of 510 nm. It provided the ideal alternative, due to its high wavelength and visibility. The interesting fact about green is that grass appears green because all of the colors in the visible part of the spectrum are absorbed into the leaves of the grass except green. Green is reflected, therefore grass appears green (NASA, 2007).
The Industrial Revolution generated the need for traffic signaling and requirements from the railway traffic management system were transferred to the road one. Gradually, signaling use in the industry transitioned to business.
Stay smart! Enjoy smartKPIs.com!
Aurel Brudan
Performance Architect,
www.smartKPIs.com
Banner, D.K., & Cooke, R.A. , 1982. Ethical dilemmas in performance appraisal. Journal of Business Ethics, 3, 327-333.
BBC, 2010, The man who gave us traffic lights available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/content/articles/2009/07/16/john_peake_knight_traffic_lights_feature.shtml Accessed on 20 March 2010.
George, C. S., Jr., The History of Management Thought, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972.
NASA, 2007, What Wavelength Goes With a Color? available online at http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/Wavelengths_for_Colors.html Accessed on 20 March 2010.
1 smart guerrilla marketing campaign. The buzz goes on …
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