Privacy Metrics That Matter to Business

Privacy programs hold the potential for transformative impact. Depending on the business model, an effective privacy program can drive market expansion, establish scalable foundations, and mitigate enterprise risk.

However, for many executives, privacy is perceived only as a cost center. To be fair, unless you track the right privacy metrics, it’s easy to entirely miss these broader business impacts.

To demonstrate business value, privacy metrics should expand to cover:

• Operational metrics demonstrate compliance and foster efficiency
• Business imperative metrics measure privacy’s impact on business revenue
• Business enablement metrics capture privacy’s support for internal workflows

Metrics that matter to the business are not one-size-fits-all. This blog offers a consistent approach to inform metrics that shift privacy from cost center to business enabler.

Operational Metrics: Essential but Insufficient

As the saying goes, “you manage what you measure.” Measuring a process often drives improvement of the recorded metric.

In privacy programs, the recorded metrics typically reflect the common pillars of compliance, risk management, and governance. These are essential for tracking performance and ensuring regulatory alignment, and so form a good baseline for improving internal privacy operations.  These metrics also enable analysis of program maturity over time.

As shown below, in the 2024 Data Privacy Benchmark Study, Cisco identified the ten most common privacy metrics reported to the Board. Nine focus on operational and compliance activities. Only one attempts to capture privacy’s broader strategic value to the organization, in the catch-all “value of privacy to organization.”

Operational metrics are critical for privacy program managers, but they offer little insight for business strategy. The Future of Privacy Forum's (FPF) Privacy Metrics Report includes dozens of common metrics to assess privacy programs. By measuring team workloads and timelines, these metrics provide insight into efficiencies and risks to compliance. Stakeholders may benefit from these detailed insights to inform overall compliance risk.

However, as the privacy program matures and stabilizes, the value of operational metrics for broader stakeholders diminishes. Instead, they only need to be informed when trends in metrics indicate new risks or reasons to invest. And in fact, the emphasis of these metrics contributes to the perception of the privacy program as a cost center.

Therefore, as the privacy program advances, privacy leaders would benefit from introducing metrics that measure the strategic value of privacy initiatives. FPF calls these business imperative metrics.

Business Imperatives: Measuring Impact on Revenue

Business value stems from business goals. To make privacy transformative, privacy leaders must identify and measure where privacy  acts as a catalyst for business value. The FPF report refers to these metrics as measuring business imperatives.

To identify appropriate business imperative metrics, ask:

• How does the business create revenue?
• Where is trust essential to revenue realization?

In other words, to shift from cost center to business enabler, privacy must link directly to core business activities and value creation.

Examples include:

• Where privacy due diligence was critical to closing a deal, such as where a privacy team member was involved in a sales call or where the privacy team responded to a due diligence questionnaire
• Where opt-in rates enabled personalization, when combined with data on the value of consumers who opt-in vs. opt-out

The precise metrics depend on the specific business model. They should ideally reflect a specific financial impact.

Business Enablement: Improving Internal Workflows

In addition to directly influencing revenue, privacy teams have an indirect impact through their role supporting other teams, from vendor review to product development. Privacy leaders need visibility into these processes in order to shape privacy’s cross-functional impact. The FPF report calls these business enablement metrics, as a specific type of business imperative. Related metrics identify opportunities to improve collaboration and demonstrate privacy’s operational value across the organization. 

To develop business enablement metrics, ask:

• How does this department contribute value?
• What metrics does this department track and report on?
• Where is trust essential to the department’s workflow?
• What requests does this department make of the privacy team?

FPF calls these business enablement metrics, such as:

• Speed of response to inbound vendor questionnaires, prospect due diligence, etc.
• Time efficiencies in conducting privacy assessments (e.g., privacy impact assessments, transfer impact assessments, vendor assessments, and negotiating data processing agreements)

These measures often reveal opportunities to improve the privacy team's interactions with other departments. For example, where privacy is perceived as a blocker, these metrics offer insights as to where bottlenecks occur. With data on such pain points in hand, privacy leaders can persuasively ask for executive support, such as introducing privacy requirements earlier in product-development cycles. This proactive approach builds a reputation of privacy as a partner, with data to back up the business impact.

Keeping Metrics Meaningful Over Time

Metrics only matter if they drive decisions. Privacy leaders must not only track numbers, but they also must put them in context to ensure trends reflect reality, capture meaningful impact, and enable conversations that drive improvement.

For example, the data may show that the time to respond to privacy due diligence requests has increased. If this is the only metric, this may be perceived negatively. However, if the organization had raised its risk threshold, the overall volume may have dropped, leaving only the most complex cases in the queue. This context shifts the conversation towards what the metric means and whether different changes are required, based on the evolved business environment.

Business priorities may also shift. Privacy leaders already routinely monitor new initiatives for privacy implications. With a more mature metrics program, privacy leaders should also leverage these insights to determine whether existing metrics continue to appropriately capture privacy team impact.

In other words, privacy metrics only support business impact when they evolve dynamically with the business. 

From Cost Center to Business Catalyst

When privacy programs are first initiated, operational metrics are highly valuable. They enable privacy leaders to understand and improve the way privacy is put into practice. Yet as the privacy program matures, operational metrics tend to promote the perspective that privacy programs are only compliance programs, or that privacy is only a cost center.

Expanding metrics to include business imperatives and business enablement creates a broader, more enlightened understanding: that privacy is good for business.