So whilst the “yes they are” side had their turn last week, let’s turn to the other side of the coin and make the claim for the fact that no, dashboards are not part of performance management. After all, performance management is all about the act of “doing” something to impact the course of action within your organization, and by its very nature, dashboards are passive, and allow just a different presentation of data. Just seeing that an arrow is pointed downwards isn’t performance management—it’s what you do as a result of the arrow pointing downward that impacts results.
The other risk in taking the “pro” side of the argument is that is short changes the really great things that can be done once you get beyond the dashboard itself. Too often there is an unhealthy reliance by executives who long for a dashboard, cockpit, scorecard, or whatever nomenclature they feel is appropriate, which will automatically pinpoint the area of the business that needs their attention. At it’s worst this is just lazy, and at it’s best, it’s naïve. There’s hardly ever a silver bullet solution to a problem that is manifest by a blinking red light or a downward pointing arrow on one’s computer screen.
Instead, the blinking light is often the culmination of many decisions and occurrences, that, when aggregated and compared against the goal or metric, show up as needing attention. And it the act of getting to the bottom of the issue, taking corrective action, and ensuring it doesn’t happen again that’s at the heart of performance management, not the act of seeing the blinking light in the first place.
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