> In the end it should matter very little how they are obtained as long as they are accurate.

That's about as actionable of a statement as a CEO telling you he wants you to do whatever "will be the most successful." Well duh :)

This is the road to metric dysfunction.

Or at least, if you continue to use the metric that diagnosed the problem while trying to address it, you're going to get what you measure. With most groups I've been with, they were relieved to get the metrics good enough to detect anything at all, and don't have the stamina to come up with a more accurate way to determine the same thing.

A lot of times an action is the product of many analyses that individually aren't actionable. To me it's similar to managing fixed vs. variable costs. You've got to make investments of various size, but the payoff needs to correspond to the investment.

Well, as an analyst looking forward to finding future jobs, its often more important :P

Accurate results are not necessarily actionable.

correct, but inaccurate results are never actionable.

If only that were true in practice. The stories I could tell about mistakes I've found...

At the end of the day, your point is 100% correct.