Measuring Performance In Services by McKinsey

McKinsey Quarterly has an interesting article ,Measuring Performance In Services.

Here is a small part of the text. To do so, it is necessary to bear in mind a few essential principles of service measurement.

First, service companies need to compare themselves against their own performance rather than against poorly defined external measures. Using external benchmarks only compounds the difficulties that service companies face in getting comparable measurements from different parts of the organization.

Service companies must look deeper than their financial costs in order to discover and monitor the root causes of those expenses. This point may seem self-evident, yet many companies fail to understand these causes fully.

Finally, service companies must set up broad cost-measurement systems to report and compare all expenses across the functional silos common to service delivery organizations. The goal is to improve the service companies' grasp of the cross-functional trade-offs that must be made to rein in total costs.

None of these principles is easy to implement.

... by developing internal trees for each service line can a company begin to understand its true cost drivers. A tree allows a manager to compare the performance of different accounts against similar metrics and also to calculate which improvements will have the most impact on the top-level figure.

Mobile Data Extenders

A home office that is on the fringe of reliable and affordable communications could benefit from this gear.

The cost of cellular repeater is going down and now almost affordable for consumers. These have been available from other vendors, though expensive.

EV-DO router. There are others on the market.

This to-be-released VOIP handset from Netgear shows the VOIP industry is maturing. It is pre-loaded with Skype and may be easy enough to use by non-technical people.

Quick Flickr Front End With Ruby On Rails

This video shows how a custom front end to Flickr was created in a few minutes.