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With business spread around the world and changing constantly, those who plan and execute performance strategies need the latest information as soon as it becomes available. Advances in technology helped create these conditions, and new developments can assist businesspeople in dealing with them. In particular, three related technologies - scorecards, dashboards and performance alerts - establish meaningful contexts that enable users to analyze, measure, share and act on information quickly.
Scorecards, dashboards and alerts all support performance management but differ significantly in how they do so. A dashboard is an application that helps you monitor an organization's performance, whereas a scorecard helps you manage performance. Performance alerts are notifications of key trends or business events that tie to either scorecard or dashboard goals. For example, a typical manufacturing business would use a corporate scorecard to manage its overall progress toward a yearly strategic goal, such as expanding market share in Asia, by mapping its operational, financial, customer and organizational expansion initiatives to specific scorecard measures. The scorecard then would show not only progress toward the goal but also where imbalances exist and where action needs to be taken. Dashboards, on the other hand, are a way to display and monitor progress on organizational business process and individuals' measures, such as sales quotas and product quality. Users can then set performance alerts to monitor dashboard or scorecard measures that notify them of actual or potential goal shortfalls, such as a poor regional revenue outlook or rising complaint calls at the contact center.
Survey Parameters
As part of Ventana Research's ongoing primary research, we set out to learn how extensively companies are employing these tools and to determine trends and priorities in their use. In January and February 2006, we conducted a survey of 590 managers and analysts in companies that use scorecards, dashboards and performance alerts. Nearly half (45 percent) of the respondents came from the lines of business, followed by 41 percent from the IT function. Finance accounted for 11 percent of respondents, and the remaining three percent work in HR. The survey participants are from a variety of industries, none of which contributed more than 14 percent of the respondents.
Our analysis of the survey results yielded a wealth of data about how...