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photo, Kent Bauer
One of the keys to successful implementation of corporate performance management (CPM) dashboards is selection of the appropriate framework (i.e., metaphor) to house all the metric, graphic, administrative, alerting and document linking components. Last month, we touched on the varying business needs of the different stakeholders - the board of directors (BOD), executives, line-of-business (LOB) managers, functional managers and operational managers. Now we will explore in more detail how their specific business needs dictate which of the many competing "metaphors," such as briefing books, balanced scorecards and portfolio charts, fits the bill. The Dimension of Needs As a precursor to discussing the multiple framework options, we will focus on the business needs of the stakeholders. The dimension of needs matrix (see Figure 1) captures the functionality and subject content required to meet the myriad needs of the different stakeholders. These needs can range from mundane administrative tasks, such as calendaring, note taking and agenda access to more sophisticated activities such as capturing cross-business key performance indicators and real-time business forecasting. Examples of these dimensions include:
* Administrative: improve productivity by facilitating committee meeting activities such as event scheduling, agenda/minutes retrieval, hit-list creation and real-time document access. * Collaboration: provide global anywhere, anytime access capabilities to enhance information sharing and proactive decision making to ensure that all business units and functional areas are using only "one true version of corporate data." * Document Management: create an integrated repository to view in one convenient place all related corporate documents (presentations, reports, analysis), forms (expense, compensation) and meeting contents (agenda, notes, minutes) as well as external information (white papers, case studies, benchmark studies). * Interactive Analysis: drill down on key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics to more detailed levels to understand causative factors driving business activities. * Problem Resolution: identify and address issues before they become problems by highlighting shifts in customer preferences, new operational challenges or performance numbers falling outside accepted norms via alert...