The global village that Marshall McLuhan talked about two decades ago is here. Everyone is a click away from volumes of information. Today, metrics need to reflect the current state of different variables. It is a real danger for companies to drive decisions based on historical, not contemporary, data. Information Must Be Comparative Facts alone can end up as a collection of noise, not a symphony of findings.
Risk managers can turn data into information by relating it to their environment.
Having metrics will not be helpful if information choices are limited and not comparable. In today s world however, there are many choices and results can change dramatically by rearranging variables. Good metrics demonstrate the comparison between years, operating units, or alternatives. They provide trend and benchmark data to identify variances. When measuring any information, it is easy to pick a variable that is available but it may be incomplete.