In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving business landscape, organizations face mounting pressure to deliver on their most strategic initiatives and demonstrate measurable results. However, tracking and measuring the progress and performance of these initiatives can be a daunting task, particularly when it comes to understanding true impact. Organizations often struggle to capture accurate data from different sources, identify meaningful insights, and tie these insights back to desired outcomes.

Moreover, strategic initiatives often require input from various functional areas as well as outside organizations such as partners, vendors, investors, and more. This adds a layer of complexity to data collection and analysis. Data security is a growing concern in the digital age and the risk of sensitive data falling into the wrong hands is a constant worry for organizations. This can hinder partnering organizations’ willingness to share data and insights with each other, making it difficult to capture a true picture of performance.

When initiatives span multiple functional areas or organizations, another challenge is that it is difficult to establish a single source of truth that provides all stakeholders with a comprehensive view of the progress being made. It’s difficult to drive action across multiple, independent organizations without a shared understanding of a strategy’s effectiveness. This often leads to initiatives stalling and never fulfilling their intended purpose.

A new approach is required. Organizations need a digital infrastructure to manage and measure their most strategic initiatives and highest level company objectives. Using the Metaimpact platform, organizations can tap into advanced analytical capabilities to track leading and lagging indicators of initiative performance, enabling them to swiftly make adjustments and converge on alternate strategies when warranted.

The Metaimpact Process

When onboarding a new customer, Metaimpact starts with a discovery meeting to confirm the platform’s intended use and determine what metrics need to be created to measure performance and impact. Usually metrics are tied to an initiative’s desired outcomes. If, for instance, an organization would like to become carbon neutral by a specific date, a metric associated with that outcome might be ‘remaining carbon emissions’ or something similar.

From there, we determine what data is needed to create the set of determined metrics and identify who administers or owns the data source(s). Metaimpact’s preference is to get the data administrator(s) involved as early as possible to accelerate the process.

Once a metric has been created within the Metaimpact platform, it’s added to the organization’s metric grid for internal viewing and can be grouped by type. A metric can also be added to any ecosystem, initiative, shared space, or outcome that it’s aligned to. If an organization wants another internal department or external stakeholder to have access to a metric in order to understand how an initiative or goal is progressing, sharing it in an ecosystem, initiative, or shared space provides visibility to all stakeholders that have been invited into that space. Sharing metrics in this way also eliminates data ownership issues as these spaces are not “owned by” a single organization. Rather, they are neutral, third-party locations where all organizations have equal access and rights.

Metaimpact offers a number of metric functions to improve understanding and discovery. Users have the ability to create a metric using other metrics as inputs, view a metric within a specific timeframe to better understand how an organization or ecosystem is progressing toward specific targets, and use metrics for benchmarking purposes. In terms of benchmarking, in the platform, Metaimpact users are able to select any number of organizations to compare at a metric level and visually analyze over time. This is beneficial for a number of reasons. By mapping the performance of various organizations at once, users are able to see which internal and external stakeholders are pulling their weight in regards to outcome contribution, gain a better understanding of key strategic relationships, see if certain organizations are skewing overall success rates, and more.

Quantifying the impact of strategic initiatives is a critical aspect of success in today’s digital age. It’s a task that is becoming increasingly complex, yet more vital than ever before. Fortunately, Metaimpact provides a framework for organizations to manage their most strategic initiatives in a measurable and meaningful way.