What are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?
A key performance indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable measure that shows how well a company or its products are performing against key strategic goals. KPIs provide targets for teams to shoot for, milestones to gauge progress, and insights that help people across the organization make better decisions.
Why it matters
From finance and HR to marketing and sales, KPIs ensure teams are supporting the overall goals of the organization. Clear, well-defined KPIs are the connective tissue that aligns daily operational decisions with strategic intent — and they are the primary signal that decision intelligence platforms optimize against.
See how Diwo operationalizes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Read the decision-intelligence playbooks that put this concept to work at Fortune 50 scale.
Related concepts
Actionable metrics are data that helps you make decisions and helps your business reach its goals or grow. They are related to something you can control or repeat meaningfully.
A BI (business intelligence) dashboard is a data visualization and analysis tool that displays on one screen the status of key performance indicators (KPIs) and other important business metrics. Dashboards serve as integral components of most BI software platforms and deliver analytics information to business executives and workers. They typically visualize data through charts, graphs, and maps to help stakeholders understand, share, and collaborate on information.
Data-driven decision-making (DDDM) involves leveraging facts, metrics, and data to direct strategic business choices that support organizational goals, objectives, and initiatives. When companies fully harness their data's potential, all personnel — from business analysts to sales managers to frontline staff — gain the ability to make improved decisions grounded in data on a regular basis.
Advanced analytics leverages sophisticated autonomous and semi-autonomous tools to evaluate large datasets of real-time and historical information. These tools—including artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms—can process both structured and unstructured data, though text-based unstructured data typically requires preprocessing through text mining before becoming actionable.