Posted By Dashboard Spy / 19th July 2011
This guest post is provided by the good folks at Klipfolio.com
Are you focused on your priorities?
A list of 90 Key Performance Indicators is a contradiction in terms.
By Allan Wille, CEO, Klipfolio Inc.
You have regular meetings to discuss performance. Every quarter, there’s a bigger meeting where the organization looks at its successes and failures and reevaluates its priorities.
How is progess measured between meetings? Maybe there’s a spreashseet that you update when you have time or there are complex reports from an enterprise resource planning system. Do you look at them? Does it matter?
If the answer is yes, you belong to a select group of people that can overcome daily distrations to stay focused on the big picture. It’s too bad you spend so much time digging and analysing. In the time that remains you’re an informed and effective contributer to organizational goals.
But if you’re like the rest of us with competing demands that make focusing on KPIsdifficult or impossible, this article is for you.
Obvious priorities
Here is a snap shot of NORAD. Even if you don’t know what NORAD does, you can make an educated guess based on the image. This is because NORAD’s priorities, the USA, the former USSR, and the space between the two, are right in front of everyone. If something changes it would be difficult to miss.
Alternatively, here is a picture of a German emergency response center. Like NORAD, in this business saving time saves lives. It’s easy to see that the operator can keep a close eye on the railways and highways that matter to her job performance.
With that in mind, let’s compare the screens used by marketing, media, and IT professionals. Like you, their job performance, and the overall performance of their organizations, is measured against previously agreed-upon success metrics.
Emergency Response Center photo courtesy of pixelquelle.de
The CEO’s Desktop
This executive owns an advertising firm with a variety of household names on his client list. It’s easy to guess atkey performance indicators (KPIs) that might keep him up at night: progress against revenue targets and renewal rates for existing clients come to mind.
Judging by the 90 icons on his desktop, he wants quick access to a lot of information. Even if his key performance information is just a click away behind one of these icons, there’s now only a 1 in 90 chance of that icon being the one that captures his attention. Add ringing phones, email alerts, and people coming in and out of his office to that mix, and it doesn’t get any better.
How about the VP Marketing?
Instead of basing decisions on anecdotal evidence and individual opinions like “I really like beige”, modern marketers have a lot performance metrics and analytics options.
As the VP Marketing for a business intelligence software startup, you might expect this guy’s desktop to stream web analytics information like web visitors, program spending, marketing-generated sales pipeline, marketing ROI, qualified-leads and lots of others.
Instead, there are about 50 icons – half the number appearing on the CEO’s desktop. But no performance metrics.
Let’s Look at a Mid-Level Manager
Elsewhere on the org chart we find a Manager at a media buying agency. Judging by her desktop, she’s either highly organized, or most of her work takes place in person or on the phone. Despite that, it’s safe to assume that she needs to stay on top of program spending for different clients using different media channels as well as tracking the results. She’d probably appreciate having those figures right in front of her when a client calls with questions.
There are only 9 icons on this desktop though there are 20 more shortcuts appearing on the dock at the bottom of her screen. From 90 icons for C-level management, to 50 for the VP and 30 for managers, this tiny sample of desktops suggests that the higher you are on the corporate ladder, the more issues you have to monitor. Alternatively, it implies that senior mangers aren’t very good filers, which seems unlikely. Regardless of the reason no can see their performance metrics at a glance.
Are technical people different?
Here’s an IT Manager’s desktop. He manages the servers, email, work stations, and service desk tickets for a federal government agency.
The performance metrics you’d expect him to be concerned with include server states, bandwidth usage, virus alerts, and help desk tickets. With the productivity of all the information workers at the agency under his care, he could really benefit from having network performance information on his desktop.
Performance from theory to execution
Exceed the limits of your attention span and the quality of your work is bound to be affected. The beauty of metrics-based performance management is that your organization identifies a short list of KPIs that fits within your attention span. A list of 90, 50 or 30 key performance indicators is a contradiction in terms. Long before you get to 30 discrete measures, they’re no longer “key”. Big league baseball does its best to contradict this idea by reporting more player performance statistics than you can swing a maple bat at.
KPIs are not new thinking. They have been recognized for more than a decade in most board rooms. But they often stay in the board room until the next meeting. That’s where desktop dashboards like Klipfolio come in.
Unavoidably on your desktop
Look at how Klipfolio, the KPI dashboard for business, changes two of our examples: the VP Marketing and the IT Manager.
Web analytics
If the VP Marketing monitors web-based KPIs, here’s a Klipfolio web marketing dashboard for him. Marketing KPIs such as sales leads, top keywords, and web traffic come straight out of Google Analytics to his desktop. The VP can mouse over any metric for more info and then drill down into it with just a click. He can dock the dashboard across the top of his screen, down either side, along the bottom, or leave it floating, and still have lots of real estate for his other icons or applications.
Service desk
Here’s a Klipfolio Enterpriseservice desk dashboardadded to the IT Manager’s desktop. It tracks various departmental KPIs: device states, open help tickets, and many more. With these KPIs on his desktop, the IT Manager has still has plenty of real estate for his 50 icons – though he may no longer need them. Unlike using a browser-based dashboard, if he launches another application, a spreadsheet, email, or anything else, the Klipfolio dashboard is still visible.
See, decide, act
Most departments could benefit from keeping their KPIs in front of their team members full time. In addition to executives, marketers, and service desks, other groups like sales and operations are already working to automate their processes and present the results to employees quickly and clearly.
Before now KPIs have been trapped on white boards and flip charts in board rooms; then buried in complex ERP systems; and most recently kept in browser-based enterprise dashboards that may or may not be noticed and used by information workers.
Each advance is one step closer to an environment that people will turn to for at-a-glance awareness of their priorities. Software dashboards like Klipfolio complete this evolution by promoting your organization’s carefully considered KPIs on the desktop where they need to appear. Because it’s hard to hit a target you can’t see.
Recommended Reading
Posted By Dashboard Spy / 12th April 2011
I just read an interesting page from Klipfolio that states that “having real-time visibility of operational business metrics, like sales or financial KPIs, via a KPI dashboard accelerates decision making and can have an immediate impact on business outcome. A recent survey by the Aberdeen group shows that companies that encourage key performance indicator awareness, are more than two times better than the average for both financial operating performance, and year-over-year sales pipeline performance.”
That’s two times better. Twice the performance!
The page is at this link: Key Performance Indicator
Some more from the page:
The use of key performance indicators is an integral part of business intelligence. Desktop dashboard software makes the presentation of many KPIs compelling and relevant that keeping track of performance against them is easy. However, it is important to choose KPIs that are relevant to the business objectives of the user and care should be given to the presentation of the information within a KPI dashboard that makes it simple for the user to see what is happening and to take the action required.
A clear visualisation of a KPI should provide relevance to the data being presented within the KPI dashboard to present the user with information in such a way that the KPI that is not simply a number but has added meaning and insight without adding complexity that empowers the user to take the appropriate action.
Recommended Reading
Posted By Dashboard Spy / 26th February 2011
Faster KPI Dashboard Deployment: Saw this press release from the Klipfolio folio. Definitely worth checking out:
Faster KPI Dashboard deployment using Klipfolio Dashboard Developer Edition Version 6.0 – Build Klips faster and with less lines of code.
New customizable date ranges and flexible filter logic in Klips significantly reduces code development required for KPI Dashboard deployment
Ottawa, Canada – February 24, 2011: Klipfolio Inc, the leading provider of KPI dashboard software for the enterprise, today announced the immediate availability of Klipfolio Dashboard Developer Edition version 6.0, a rapid development environment designed to simplify the development and improve the quality-level of new Klips to business users.
The full-featured Developer Edition includes a step-by-step workflow assistant, debugging tools, code samples, templates and demonstration examples. The development environment enables rapid proof of concept (POC) development of KPI dashboards to business users.
Klipfolio Dashboard version 6.0 includes additional flexibility for data selection providing the end-user greater flexibility to define, search and filter data contained in Klips on their desktop eliminating the need to develop code for these features. The advanced development tools in Klipfolio Dashboard Developer Edition 6.0 reduce overall development time, making Klips even easier to develop and deploy.
Also as part of this release, Klipfolio Dashboard Manager is available to streamline the management of larger enterprise dashboard deployments. Dashboard Manager provides a centralised administration interface for the management and deployment of developed Klips and the management of software revisions and updates in a production environment.
“Klipfolio Dashboard Developer Edition streamlines the development and deployment process for customers and enables them to quickly move from a proof of concept to full production“ said Terry Brown, Director of Marketing at Klipfolio. “By giving users greater self service options for the presentation of data in Klips, we have further reduced the development time. The amount of scripting for these advanced features has, in some cases, been removed completely.”
Klipfolio Dashboard is trusted by Fortune 1000 customers in over 30 countries, providing real-time enterprise information that improves data usability by increasing the awareness and visibility of key performance indicators. Enabling some of the industry’s leading healthcare, financial, technology and transportation companies to remain ahead of their competitors.
According to a recent study by Aberdeen Group, companies that employ operational dashboards and ensure intra-daily metrics are visible to employees, are more than two times better than the average for both financial operating performance, and year-over-year sales pipeline performance.
Availability
Klipfolio Dashboard Developer Edition version 6.0 is available as a fully featured 30 day evaluation by visiting www.klipfolio.com, and is available as an upgrade to all existing customers. Contact the sales team at 877-233-6149 if you would like to arrange a demonstration or to discuss how Klipfolio Dashboard can address the operational Business Intelligence needs of your business.
About Klipfolio Inc.
Klipfolio develops Klipfolio Dashboard – the KPI Dashboard – to help Fortune 1000 companies increase the visibility of key performance indicators to make informed decisions that improve performance and profitability. It is the only business dashboard that presents operational information directly on the desktop where it’s always visible, accessible, and actionable. Clients include; Intel, Staples, Baxter Healthcare, EMC and Lufthansa.
For more information, please contact:
Allan Wille
Klipfolio Inc.
Phone:+1-613-233-6149
Email: press@klipfolio.com
Recommended Reading
Posted By DashboardWire / 13th June 2010
I would first like to thank Hubert aka the Dashboard Spy for providing the opportunity to blog!
A fellow dashboard designer asked me to reprint this article. He’s asking if anyone can add to this explanation of a business dashboard and the explanation of the dashboard metaphor
So what’s behind the dashboard? Is it really like a auto dashboard?
Why do you need a dashboard? What are you measuring? Why are you measuring it? Why is it important? Is it really important or just nice to know? Now that you have this information, what are you going to do with it? Will this information change how we make decisions? If we had this information X month’s ago, would we be somewhere different today? I.e. would it have caused a change in prior behavior that would have led us down a different path? Does another “dial” on the dashboard tell me the same thing in a different way? Do I need to know this information every day/week/month/year? What is the relevant timeframe to provide the information? I STRONGLY encourage everyone to ask these questions of their dashboards. Write out the answers. REALLY, write them out. Take the time and you will gain new insight that you may not have had before, and may eliminate some extra stuff on you dashboard.
The Tach.
Here is a real world example of what I mean (with a real dashboard). My car has an automatic transmission. It also has a tachometer on the dashboard. Why? What does knowing engine speed tell me, other than how fast the engine is running and that it is running? Nothing. It is just extra stuff to fill up my head as I drive down the road. If the engine quit running, all the other dash lights would come on and tell me the engine was stopped, my speed would be dropping, etc. If I know engine speed that’s ok, but I cannot do anything about it other than step on the gas or brake (as opposed to a car with a manual transmission where I need to know engine speed to optimize gear changing for either fuel economy or performance). It really is useless to know since I can get the same information elsewhere. I watch the tach go up and down and I can tell that the car shifted gears since I can feel it usually. But again, why do I care, I don’t care what gear I am in since I bought an automatic transmission. It takes care of that for me.
The Temp.
I like having the outside temperature gauge on my car so I know how hot or cold it is outside. But didn’t I know that before I got in the car (other than long road trips where you might really have a large temperature change). Again, WHY do I need to know that? Is in nice to know? Probably, but can I do anything about the outside temperature? Can I make it hotter or cooler? Now what if the temperature has dropped below freezing on a trip? Then I really need to know so that I can be more alert for icy patches of road. Now it is something I NEED to know. But only during certain conditions. So there is value to it, but not all the time.
So What?
I hope these two examples will get everyone to think about why they are putting information on a dashboard and how frequently that information needs to be presented. Sure there are a lot of things that are nice to know, but don’t we all have too much information coming at us from all directions? Let’s try to make our dashboards really stand out by having just what we need on them to really manage a company/division/department/process/etc. Just because you can put something on a dashboard does not mean that you should. Think of networking your toaster in your kitchen. You can put it on your home network but WHY?
Thank you for your time reading this. I would like any feedback or your thoughts.
Paul
Recommended Reading
