Guided by Dashboards

He also talks of performance dashboards as “change agents,” explaining that the process of identifying key performance metrics can lead a company to examine critical data it may have been ignoring or underusing. In the process of building a dashboard, a large retail client of iBusiness found it had a trove of customer satisfaction data that had never been aggregated, studied, or brought to the attention of management. The company’s dashboard now displays customer satisfaction scores as one of its key metrics, and Brands says this has filtered down throughout the corporation, creating a new and increased focused on customer feedback.

Everyone Benefits

Overall dashboard costs and timelines are difficult to define, mostly because each organization will have its own process for determining key metrics. Each will also have differing levels of expertise and internal or external resources upon which to draw. That said, a simple executive dashboard, if all the underlying data is available and in good shape, can be created for several thousand dollars and can be done in a few weeks to a month or two. Most projects will probably require more than that, including time with outside consultants and an IT staff to define the data, map out the dashboard, program the system, and train users.

Woodburn says one of his clients spent about $25,000 over a six-month period to create a dashboard for use by a core team of two or three people. That project has been so successful that it is now being rolled out to a base of 50 to 75 users, and will eventually be available to 200 to 300 of the company’s executives and managers nationwide.

Although performance dashboards can benefit a business of any size, they appear to be most prevalent among mid-to-large sized companies. “Eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies do some form of dashboarding,” Vernon estimates. “Most companies of $50 million to $100 million and up in sales will have a need to check their metrics on a regular basis.”

The structure of an organization may also lend itself to dashboarding. Companies that have widely distributed operations or have numerous levels of management may be particularly well suited. “If you’re located in the Midwest or on the East Coast, [a dashboard] can be a good way to find out, at a glance, what your West Coast operations are doing,” Vernon notes.

Brands says various kinds of businesses can benefit from using a dashboard. He lists a large national retail organization, an international high-tech manufacturing firm, a mid-market b-to-b healthcare organization, and several public sector and educational institutions as among his dashboard clients. Practicing what he preaches, Brands uses an internal company dashboard regularly—each Monday morning he checks his dashboard for net profit, profit per hour, and other key metrics based on timecards entered each Friday by employees and consultants. During the week, Brands can call up the same data to see how the company is doing on a month-to-date, year-to-date, or project-by-project basis.

“I have never heard anyone say, ‘This is not the right thing to do,’” Woodburn says.

“From an executive standpoint, a dashboard is your way of aligning corporate strategy and leveraging key business metrics so that you can communicate effectively through the whole organization, on strategic, tactical, or operational levels. What executive does not want to do that?”