The great dashboard conspiracy

One of the realities of the dashboard discussion is that regardless of whether you marked yourself as in favor of dashboards as being core to performance management or voted against them as just another tool in the bag of tricks, nobody has stopped to ask if you truly need another dashboard. And maybe as importantly, how do all the existing metrics, dashboards, data and activities you are tracking actually translate to how you manage the organizational horsepower under the hood of the organization? When you step on the gas does it actually have an impact?

One of the realities of the dashboard debate is that there is already a proliferation of dashboard technology available in most applications. Pile this on top of the widget craze which is so core to web 2.0 talk and available widely from small start ups as well as with your new laptop from Best Buy loaded with Microsoft Vista. Your ERP has multiple versions of dashboards, portals and views into metrics, your CRM system may have as many as 5 dashboards views, anything you use in a SaaS model is fully dashboard compliant, and business intelligence and business process vendors provide their own strategic scorecards and real time dashboards respectively. And don’t be surprised if the folks in finance (and maybe a few old school sales managers) have their own Excel based dashboard. Dashboards gone wild…

The reality for most organizations is that metrics being tracked in a report or a dashboard are often tracked in a silo, using historical data, and do not result in action. The metrics being tracked don’t actually reflect the process of how people work up and down the organization. They lack consistency, don’t result in immediate action, and often make the issue worse not better as people scramble to correct a metric or threshold they don’t completely understand or measure correctly. And this assumes you actually saw the metric move in your dashboard or could find the related information.

A recent survey by Accenture in the US and the United Kingdom highlighted that 56% of people in finance spend more than 2 hours per day searching through multiple sources to find data. More than 50% of the finance respondents indicated they missed critical business data between three and 10 times per week. What is scary about this statistic is that these are bean counters we are talking about here, the ones who manage the details and the cash for a living. If they are missing the boat, what does that suggest about the operations team, customer service or IT, much less the sales and marketing team?

As you wade into the great dashboard debate, stop to ask what your strategy is. Who really needs another dashboard and how and will it impact how you manage the way you work? Any maybe most importantly, do the core metrics being measured really impact the business? A buddy of mine drives a Saab and he swears by the night driving feature which allows you to press a button which turns the lights off across the whole dashboard with the exception of the speedometer. Regardless of what you call it, that’s the “dashboard” I really want.