Success! Everyone wants it, some organisations have it and others… Well, they often talk up a good story to keep the shareholders happy.
The real question is how do you define it – both in public and in private? Should there even be any difference in a transparent open business? I’m confident that Lee Williams and the other top folks at Symbian have their dashboards and their key performance indicators – the question is what is on them?
At SEE a number of the senior Symbian managers explained that the organisation has a wide variety of stakeholders that it is trying to make happy. So, maybe there should be metrics for each one – just to be fair?
Here’s a highly random selection, which could be counted monthly, just to generate some conversation on this topic.
Handsets: Number of newly released devices based on the Symbian OS (i.e. forked from Symbian’s codeline so Nokia doesn’t count), number of handsets where the Symbian brand is mentioned on the case of the device itself or the packaging
Applications: Number of applications available (paid-for, freeware, open source), number of downloads aggregated across app store sites
OS developers: Number of kits downloaded, number of posts in the forums, number of posts on the mailing lists, number of unique contributors to forums / mailing lists, number of non-member developers with Contributor status, number of code reviews, number of accepted submissions per Package, defect inflow and outflow by package, code churn, number of binary breaks, number of API breaks
Open Source: Amount of open source software (applications, codecs, etc) supported on the OS, number of open source libraries used within the OS
Service providers: Number of standard web standards supported (e.g HTML 5 or Google Gears)
Consumers: Number ideas suggested by consumers that make it into the OS, number of defects raised by consumers fixed in the OS
Symbian itself: Number of member companies, conferences attended, developer meetings held, apps published via Horizon, non-member-company members
A public dashboard of some of these, or other far more sensible measurements, would top my list of things for Symbian to do right now.
Of course while Symbian could choose to measure any or all of these they can’t equally prioritise organisational efforts across all of them. What I would really like to see is a prioritised Top Ten list of which measurements Symbian is going to concentrate on improving over the next twelve months. I’m not looking for targets (not that I would object if they were offered) but merely an insight into where the company is currently heading.
I’ll leave you with the thought that one easy, if silly, way to measure success is how many people (internal and external) read your blog and, more importantly, leave comments. So, do my personal KPIs a favour and leave your thoughts about what other metrics Symbian could publish below 
.
David Durant
Nokia
Twitter : @cholten99
I am searching for a key person at Symbian to whom I can e-mail a word document with improvement proposals concerning the Symbian OS. Can anyone help me? Stefan
Nice piece David.
@Stefan Lind – Perhaps you could post your improvement proposals to our Ideas site or target them more directly towards the Package Owners & Technology Managers where the changes would need to be made? The Forums on our Developer website are another good place for putting concrete technical proposals.
David – you do like to stir things up, don’t you…
There are difficulties and dangers in publishing such objectives: it provides easy ammunition for the “Symbian is dead” faction to throw back at us, and it risks emphasising areas of weakness which may be beyond our control. That said, I agree that our aim to be transparent should include letting people know what we are striving to achieve, and in that spirit, here are my personal objectives for 2009 H2:
Less than a month to go!
Excuse me for writing Off-Topic – what WordPress theme are you using? It’s looking interesting!!
[...] Durrant of Nokia started a debate around that in this post. We probably moved on fron it far too fast – it really deserves some crowdsourced [...]
How about the number of third-party developers making a living writing Symbian software, including consulting, marketing to end users, and infrastructure capacities?
I agree with William that setting hard targets for an organisation that is largely at the whim of others will only allow our detractors to throw any failures to meet these targets in our face. I’ll give you an example. The target to reach full EPL by the middle of 2010. There’s still 6 months to go and many of those unfriendly to Symbian are saying that we’re being to slow in open-sourcing. Obviously they totally fail to appreciate the scale of effort involved in converting such a large body of formerly proprietary source to an open-source licence, but for these people, they make their own targets.