A business metric is any type of measurement used to gauge some quantifiable component of a company's performance, such as return on investment (ROI), employee and customer churn rates, revenues, EBITDA, and so on. Business metrics are part of the broad area of business intelligence, which comprises a wide variety of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. Systematic approaches, such as the balanced scorecard methodology, can be employed to transform an organization's mission statement and business strategy into specific and quantifiable goals, and to monitor the organization's performance in terms of achieving those goals.
This was last updated in December 2003