I think it’s a tension between useful metrics to help measure performance and stopping people who game the metrics. This is hard as vanity metrics are easy to pick and game.

I try to go for macro metrics that at least let people understand what’s important, bur also not directly rewarding specific values or targets. An example is that I’m trying to promote data hygiene in my organization so we have some guidelines for how to clean data, where to store it, etc. We a general metric for “Who is reading our guidance” to at least see what pages are read. We have another for “who is versioning their data.”

I don’t have goals tied to specific numbers of readers or data repos, but do use it to at least make sure the material is available.

I’m still testing to see, but the problem with no metrics, I think, is that sometimes people will get astray without an outside source to help test and prioritize.