Simon Waters calls me out for my posting on the “metrication of security”:

Metrication or Mensuration? I’m reminded of the audit folk who thought one of my previous employers should create a single measure of performance, which would create a new synthetic number lumping together other numbers that already existed, being an organisation full of mathematicians the immediate question was “how would you like this new measure to behave?”.

Sticking with concrete numbers allows sensible comparison of different organisations, including discovering the ways in which the organisations aren’t comparable. It also allows for an aggregation of meaningful numbers (i.e. 50 of 100 computers in your organisation have out of date Flash, and 10 of 25 in mine, we can aggregate that with the sophisticate process of addition. It of course demands that the people who look at the numbers have to do more work to understand what they mean, which in my experience a lot of people aren’t prepared to do.

The first three words are the most critical; attacking a popular dictionary:

mensuration
1. (Mathematics) the study of the measurement of geometric magnitudes such as length
2. the act or process of measuring; measurement

metrication
Conversion to the metric system of weights and measures; metrification.

So Simon is bang on the money – the word used in business probably should be mensuration, but for a couple of provisos:

1. The potential for some really embarrassing typos.
2. The fact that mensuration is “the act or process of measuring”, whereas the metrication as I have heard it used in business in the past 15 years has been “the act or process of establishing metrics, ie: of defining a means of measurement.”

Hmm. It’s slightly different; I’ll have to track down my pet grammarian to establish whether there already is a word for the latter.