One side-effect of capitalism is the modern version of the old “efficiency experts” from a century ago: The idea that everything can be represented by numbers, and you can demand the numbers change how you want. The excuse is usually cost reduction, or improved throughput, or something like that, but it isn't realistic for every situation.
Take helpline calls as an example. You track calls with a ticketing system. You can put notes in the system, and indicate if you are working on it, or you are waiting for someone. You can have a priority, so you know which tickets are more important than others.
Now, it is interesting in a descriptive way to know how long it takes to complete a ticket. When you define how you want people on a helpline to handle tickets, your goal is customer satisfaction, and ease of use (so, for instance, you don't create a new ticket when someone calls back, if they have an open ticket: no reason to duplicate data). The resulting times are worth knowing, as they can play into things like staffing levels needed to maintain that quality.
But the bean counters often want this all to run backwards, and I'm encountering that this week. Someone has decided that our lowest-priority tickets are staying open too long. The solution is to close the tickets after so-many days if we don't hear from the client. But that means if the client calls back later, we have to go find the old ticket in order to get the information for the new ticket. This is busy work, to serve a numbers game, and the thing being sacrificed is the customer satisfaction and ease of use.
Another example of this is when you measure something like average length of a phone call on a helpline. A call takes as long as it takes, but I've seen managers challenge why we have calls more than ten minutes long. What makes them think that calls we handle can be resolved in ten minutes or less? The only way to possible improve the times would be to get our clients to improve their communication skills…but that's not under our control. Arbitrarily decided that a ten-minute-call average is “standard” for a particular case is just praying to the “numbers” face of the capitalist god.