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Any enterprise that has taken the time to understand its business well enough to provide accurate KPI reports has taken a significant step towards higher performance. But all too often the “great leap forward” promised by a KPI process ends with a rarely updated and never used report, scorecard, or dashboard hidden somewhere on a corporate intranet. For an organization to gain any value from the KPI identification process, the resulting tracking and reporting must lead directly to action in the form of decisions. And as soon as your workforce starts using web and mobile dashboards or reports to make decisions, the enterprise had better be sure that the reports are accurate and updated in real time. When an organizational culture chooses to begin acting on its KPIs, there's no room left for aspirational goals, visions, or missions that look good on the wall of the lunch room but that have no actual impact on the business.
As a noun, a report is something that can be ignored. A report can sit on a shelf, or in an inbox, or on a server and be completely ignored even if it is full of critical KPI data that the enterprise needs to recognize and act on. But as a verb, the word report means business. It suggests that your key performance indicators are not passively waiting for your employees to notice them. When you treat “report” or “reporting” as a verb, your KPIs should find the appropriate employees in your organization that need to be aware of change and then notify them in no uncertain terms. If the KPI is sufficiently important, it should even be garrulous: turning red, making noise, and refusing to go away until remedial action is taken. The next time a fire truck roars up behind you with its sirens blaring, consider it a key performance indicator that is reporting for duty with the expectation that you will respond appropriately. Ignore that KPI at your peril.
Enterprises that treat “reporting” as an action word turn to Klipfolio for real-time dashboards and web and mobile dashboards that put KPI reports on any device with an internet connection. These are not reports that take over your desktop and demand all your attention. That approach is certain to fail in the same way that motorists would fail to heed fire trucks if their flashers were always on. (The police in Taiwan actually do use their flashers this way though we're not sure why.) Instead, KPI reporting by Klipfolio appears on a compact web dashboard wherever you choose to put it. This can be mobile BI, dashboards on a browser, or on any device. This approach gives your workforce passive awareness of the KPIs that matter – at least until the KPIs begin to report and demand action. Various enterprise departments from sales to marketing, social media, and help desk already use Klipfolio Dashboard in this way.
