Benchmarked to Death: When Metrics Lose Meaning
There’s a moment in almost every IT leader’s career when you step back, look at your pristine dashboards glowing green, and feel that sneaking suspicion…
“Everything says we’re doing great… but something still feels off.”
Welcome to the paradox of modern IT performance management. Somewhere along the way, metrics stopped being tools and started being trophies. We’re not tracking performance—we’re chasing perfection. And we’re getting burned by it.
At Ferrous Equine Technologies, we call this problem what it is: benchmark fatigue. And in this blog, we’re going to break down what happens when your metrics start lying to you, how to stop it, and how to rebuild benchmarks that actually serve your business.
🎯 When Benchmarks Become Busywork
Let’s rewind. Benchmarks were never the problem. In fact, good benchmarks are essential:
• They create accountability.
• They give you visibility.
• They help communicate performance to leadership and stakeholders.
But over time, we’ve seen a disturbing trend: metrics get abstracted from their purpose. The organization focuses on improving the number itself instead of improving the thing the number was meant to represent.
Consider these real-life examples:
• A hospital proudly reports 99% uptime on their clinical systems… but it doesn’t include the diagnostic imaging systems that also feed into patient care.
• A managed services team closes 100% of tickets within SLA… by auto-closing stale tickets regardless of issue resolution.
• An organization touts 95% MFA enrollment… but no one’s auditing how many of those accounts are actually beingchallenged—or worse, bypassed entirely.
That’s the trap of benchmarking without context. You can optimize yourself right off a cliff.
📉 The Dangerous Side of Green Metrics
When everything looks perfect on paper, it becomes harder to:
• Ask uncomfortable questions
• Spot early warning signs
• Justify budget requests for improvements
Worse, leadership can develop a false sense of security. “Why do we need a firewall refresh if our threat alerts are down 80%?” (Never mind that the alerting system was misconfigured during a software update and hasn’t been functional since.)
In one engagement, we discovered a hospital’s patch compliance metric hadn’t dropped below 96% in over two years. Sounds great—until we dug in and found they were only patching non-critical systems because mission-critical servers were left untouched due to fear of downtime. You could practically hear the security posture deflating like a sad balloon.
⚙️ The Metrics You Should Be Using
We’re not saying throw away your dashboards—we love a good Power BI visualization as much as the next tech firm. But if your benchmarks aren’t:
• Relevant to your current environment
• Aligned with risk
• Focused on outcomes
• Reviewed and updated regularly
…then they’re not really helping you.
Here’s a better approach.
🔍 Step 1: Align Metrics to Business Value
Every benchmark you track should connect back to something tangible:
• Patient safety in a healthcare environment
• Operational uptime in manufacturing
• Customer experience in retail
• Regulatory compliance in finance
If you can’t explain why a number matters in plain English to someone outside of IT, it may not be worth tracking.
🔄 Step 2: Mix Leading and Lagging Indicators
Don’t just measure what already happened. You need a combination of:
• Lagging indicators like ticket resolution time or uptime percentages
• Leading indicators like frequency of near-misses, open vulnerabilities, or unpatched third-party apps
Together, they provide both hindsight and foresight.
🧠 Step 3: Add Human Insight
Never send a raw dashboard to the C-suite. Your reports should come with narrative:
• What happened this month?
• What changed?
• What are we worried about?
• What’s on deck?
Storytelling isn’t fluff—it’s translation. And you need a good translator between IT and operations, or you’ll be stuck in data limbo.
🧰 Step 4: Use Benchmarks to Drive Action
This might sound obvious, but we’ve seen dashboards that sit untouched for years. A proper benchmark should do one of three things:
1. Help you make a decision
2. Justify a strategic change
3. Trigger a response
If it’s not doing any of these? Retire it.
🛑 Step 5: Stop Rewarding Optics
It’s easy to create a culture where teams are pressured to “keep the numbers looking good.” That’s a trap. Reward outcomes—improved performance, fewer outages, better user experience—not the manipulation of KPIs.
If your help desk closes more tickets by rushing or bypassing escalation, you haven’t improved support—you’ve gamified the system.
🐴 Real Talk from the Forge
At Ferrous Equine Technologies, we’ve helped organizations overhaul their dashboards, redefine their KPIs, and stop wasting time tracking the wrong stuff. You don’t need 300 performance indicators. You need ten good ones that tell a story—and help you do something about it.
We’ve seen clients transform simply by:
• Replacing a “% of devices online” metric with a “% of critical endpoints reporting in real-time”
• Swapping “number of phishing emails reported” with “click-through rate of internal phishing tests over time”
• Replacing patch compliance vanity numbers with “days to patch known exploit CVEs on internet-facing systems”
Those changes didn’t just make the reports better—they made the systems stronger.
💡 Final Thought: Ask Better Questions
The best way to escape benchmark fatigue is to stop asking “how do we look?” and start asking:
• What are we missing?
• What’s hiding beneath this number?
• What’s not being measured?
• Is this still helping us?
Because at the end of the day, a green dashboard is worthless if the building is on fire behind it.
So if you’re ready to break the cycle, we’re here to help.
Want to bring your benchmarks back to life?
📩 Reach out to Ferrous Equine Technologies. We’ll help you ditch vanity metrics and build a metrics program that drives real-world improvement—without all the fluff.