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The buzz surrounding enterprise dashboards and scorecards is well deserved. But many information workers that purse an enterprise dashboard of their own lose time trying to find a single dashboard to accommodate everyone’s needs.
No two roles in an organization need to see the same key performance indicators (KPIs) on their dashboard. Different departments may draw on the same enterprise data sources, and most will also still depend on spreadsheets to some extent. But the similarity among departments can end there. And the point of subscribing to an enterprise dashboard isn’t to see someone else’s KPI reports.
Different enterprise departments need customized dashboards that display completely different performance metrics. Here are some examples from four common enterprise teams.
The modern enterprise marketing team measures performance in ways that their “gut instinct” predecessors could only dream about. Before reporting and dashboard software allowed marketers to report on important KPIs in a timely way, the success of many programs was measured by whether or not the entire budget dedicated to the effort was consumed.
This kind of “spend management” likely came about because it was difficult to measure concrete results. In this environment, the one KPI that everyone could follow – from the enterprise to the media buyer to the media – was the money trail.
If you’ve ever heard a marketer comment that his spend was on target, you’re dealing with one of these marketers. There’s still enough of them out there that Google Adwords has a feature called the “Budget Optimizer” which helps you spend all your available budget in the time period of your choosing. Gee thanks Google!
Enterprise marketing dashboards help professionals to change these behaviors with improved data visibility. Ubiquitous access to web analytics through free tools like Google Analytics can make every step of the marketing funnel more visible. It has never been easier to measure and manage marketing decisions based on actual marketing program ROI. Marketing dashboard software takes the guess work out of marketing.
Another enterprise team that can benefit from the same digital dashboard software is internal communications. Rather than program ROI, this team measures its performance with metrics like participation rates for employee programs to try and ascertain the health of the corporate culture. Internal communications teams, like the corporate help desk, look to enterprise dashboards not for KPI reports so much as alerting and notifying employees.
Employee bulletins are difficult to promote when they compete with thousands of emails, phone calls, and deadlines. Moving these communiqués to a dashboard – particularly a desktop dashboard – is a competitive advantage for internal communications teams. Call centers also provide a good example of this approach. If an important product is out of stock or a new discount becomes available, management can send an alert to the desktop of every employee. These real-time bulletins notify staff quickly and effectively.
The help desk, also increasingly referred to as the service desk, shares common cause with internal communications. A help desk dashboard is most valuable when it’s deployed to every employee desktop. Using the dashboard as a desktop alert system allows the help desk to disseminate critical information quickly. This highly visible data channel can help service desk teams preempt call storms during unplanned system outages.
If the help desk team uses the same enterprise dashboard to report on its own KPIs such as call volumes, case resolution times and more, its gains an additional advantage from the same software.
Sales teams have the most to gain from an enterprise dashboard. The success of platforms like SalesForce.com, Eloqua and others, testify to the value of improved data visibility for this department. Subscribing to these sales dashboards puts important KPIs like hot sales leads, close rates, forecast sales pipeline and more right in front of the people that drive them. Spreadsheet-based approaches to presenting these performance indicators pale in comparison to real-time charts, graphs, alerts and notifications. The argument in favor of sales dashboards is strong enough for enterprises to make the sales team its first target for any pilot dashboard deployment.
Every employee with a computer can benefit from the improved data visibility offered by enterprise dashboard software. Just because every department needs to report on different KPIs doesn’t mean the help desk should have to support a dozen different dashboard software packages. The same dashboard software should be flexible enough to accommodate marketing ROI metrics for one team and for another.
To secure the maximum return on its enterprise software investment, there is another important business requirement for the enterprise. Regardless of which KPIs are being reported, the ideal dashboard appears on the desktop rather than in a browser or another system. The value of KPI-based management hinges on the kind of information conveyed and the business decisions enabled. Compared to the unavoidable desktop, any other home for an enterprise dashboard introduces unnecessary lag into the decision-making process. After working so hard to increase data visibility, why put your dashboard anywhere else?
Learn more about enterprise dashboards.
