I mentioned AlphaBlox in my last post and that made me think of something I learned from Michael Skok (CEO and Founder of AlphaBlox, now Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners).
Michael had a great framework for explaining how each person’s daily activities fit into the larger company objectives. He called it “VMGOSPA”, an acronym for the following framework:
I had the pleasure of hearing Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics evangelist, speak when he came to our CS377W class at Stanford this quarter (the “Stanford Facebook class“). He’s an amazing speaker, really breathing life and purpose into the too-often dry topic of web analytics.
He’s promoting a new way of looking at web analytics, what he calls “Web Analytics 2.0″. Avinash’es central message is that analytics cannot stand alone as a decision driver in organizations; rather analytics need to be considered in the context of additional data (from customers, competitors, and other internal sources) in order to drive rational decisions.
Avinash has a brilliant decision framework, consisting of the five decision inputs that should be considered in order to gain insight into customer behavior and drive optimal decisions. He calls this “The Five Pillars” and here’s the cliff’s notes summary:
Setting objectives for yourself and for others is a critical organizational function. This will be painfully clear to anyone who’s ever sat in a team meeting where some “critical corporate goal” was described but no specific actions were assigned and everyone left the meeting wondering, “Ummm, so what am I supposed to do now?”
The SMART framework helps make objectives crystal clear so that anyone who is on the assigning or the receiving end of a SMART objective really understands exactly what actions are going to take place, by when, and how to measure success.
SMART is an acronym for:
