Tune Up Your DashBoard
By
Rod Travers
Senior Vice President, Technology
In order to know how well your
company is performing, you must have a means of gathering relevant
data and turning it into information about performance. Over the years
there have been several “irrational exuberance” cycles surrounding
technologies that support this need. Not one of the reporting systems
I’ve seen has ever quite delivered completely on its promise, but
things have evolved and today’s systems are actually quite good.
The first really big wave in this
arena came with the arrival of Enterprise Information Systems, or
“EIS” for short. You remember the glossy ads for those systems. The
CEO of a Fortune 500 company would sit at his or her desk and use a
touch screen to see how profitable the company was that day. A few
pushes on the touch screen would allow drilling down to any level of
detail. Those systems were nearly all a big disappointment due mostly
to the impossibility of tying together disparate systems in the days
when systems didn’t talk to each other.
But there was another reason those
systems stumbled—and that reason remains today. I’ll get to that in a
moment. First though I’d like to recognize EIS as the
technology that popularized the use of three letter acronyms to
identify “must-have” systems. Now of course we have ERP, CRM, BPM, SCM
and an endless list of others.
After EIS stumbled there was a lull
for a while but then balanced scorecards brought a resurgence.
Balanced scorecards are truly valuable but the reporting technology
has generally been onerous. Dashboards are an even more recent
creation and in my opinion are really just throwbacks to EIS but no
one’s willing to say it. Dashboards are pretty good and have the most
potential for success. They are intuitive and are typically built
using off-the-shelf tools that gather existing data and display it in
a format that makes sense.
Newest on the scene are Enterprise
Performance Management (EPM) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).
These are bound to be successful based on their three-letter
abbreviations if nothing else. And finally we have robust reporting
capabilities built into ERP, CRM and workflow systems which give us
more data that we can effectively use.
Why, then, with all this wonderful
technology is the promise of enterprise performance reporting largely
unfulfilled? (If you have the perfect EPM system or dashboard then you
are exempt from answering.) The answer goes back to that systemic
weakness I mentioned before. Most reporting systems and management
processes tend to focus on how to report performance instead of
what to measure and what to do with the information once
it’s reported. This is where most reporting systems lose their
effectiveness. What steps can you take to make your reporting drive
action? Try these:
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Measure what’s important to your customer. For example,
if customer surveys show that ASA is important to your call center
customers, measure that. If first-call resolution is more important,
measure that. In reality you will measure both but your management
emphasis should be on the more important one. Customer-driven measures help you manage
business processes, job design, staffing, and incentives to
meet those customers’ expectations and priorities. |
|
| Put more emphasis on measuring
results and less emphasis on measuring activities. Both are
needed, but the split must be weighted toward results. Experts suggest
that business processes need wiggle room to allow for improvisation
and innovation. So for example, let’s say someone on your IT support
team occasionally works outside “the support process” but is shown to
have the happiest end-users. The results speak for themselves. In
fact, maybe “the process” is in need of a fresh look? |
|
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Define scenarios and establish accountability. When an important measure is
trending unfavorably, there must be someone accountable for taking
actions to correct it. Give that person a head start with scenario
planning and build broad awareness for those scenarios. |
|
| Ask an expert. You can’t be the expert on everything.
Perhaps there is someone in another area of your company or in a
friendly peer company who has been successful with performance
reporting. Seek them out and learn their secret. Or consider using
outside assistance. Keep in mind you are looking for help on what to
measure, not how to report it. |
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| Now a caveat on how to report: Use terms that people can easily relate to.
For example, “It’s a ten-minute drive to the
office,” instead of “It’s six miles.” Individuals have varying
perceptions of distance, but time is universal. A more relevant
example might be, “Improving our quality ranking one percentage point
raises our individual bonus compensation by $100 per week.” |
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| Pilot your ideas. It’s
amazing what you can prove and disprove with a well-designed
spreadsheet before you spend big time and money on reporting
technology. |
