Ad Infinitum
[ad in-fuh-nahy-tuh m]
adverb
1) to infinity, endlessly: without limit
Dictionary.com

The owners of companies invented the concept of auditors to insure that the management was caring for the capital entrusted to their keeping. The inventors of ISO-9000 correctly realized that elevating their cause to the same level as making a profit would accomplish the quantum leap needed to catch the Japanese. They invented metrics that were given acronyms so they looked the same as financial metrics. The war for corporate resources and attention is on. Now that most western companies have quality that is on par with Japanese (We are now chasing the Koreans), the other functional company groups have joined the bandwagon by using metrics and auditors to vie for attention. This battle has resulted in an explosion of acronyms which is expanding ad infinitum. www.acronymfinder.com is now listing over 4 million acronyms and the number is growing daily.
It would be nice to think that a talented individual leading a company could find the complete set of metrics needed to eliminate waste. This is like suggesting that it is possible to enforce perfect compliance to the speed limit by using speed traps. We all know that the more severe penalties applied to reckless drivers make a bigger dent in improving public safety. In this era of proliferating acronyms, data gathering can look like an overwhelming task. It is easy to despair, if you fail to understand the principles behind Pareto analysis.

Even though all of the metrics that have been assigned acronyms have the potential for spurring an improvement, most of the benefit will occur by focusing on the top three. In a lean operation the front line worker is most aware that simply gathering metrics does not result in an improvement. As diminishing returns set in, many tabulated metrics remain static. Yes even metrics with acronyms have a “best before date”. This is not to infer that I am against gathering data. It is necessary to gather data to know whether the actions that you are contemplating actually generate an improvement. The first law of data gathering applies. [Only the person who gathers the data believes it] Every player on the team is responsible for knowing their numbers. Even the highest paid professional athletes continue to personally track their conditioning plan, in the same fashion that they employed to achieve superstar status. Making an improvement is the intersection of opportunity and the accumulated skills of each player. In a growing organization all players can quantify the improvements that they are making. This occurs because they do not waste time living in the past because they don’t track obsolete metrics ad infinitum.