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Companies become performance-accountable organizations.
The right technology can tell you how your business is performing at any moment. That technology produces dashboards, which can ultimately change the culture of your business by transforming it into a performance-accountable company. A company begins to become a performance-accountable organization when management commits to increasing each person's knowledge and understanding of what drives performance: What is the potential impact of a planned acquisition on our balance sheet? Can our existing inventory cover our forecast? How do current sales compare to our forecasts and forecasts to plans?
Dashboards provide such insights that let individuals see the big picture and, more importantly, understand the impact of their actions on the rest of the company. When dashboards were introduced a few years ago (they actually derive from the old executive information systems of the 1980s), only high-level executives had access to them to see how the business was performing. Now many companies are requiring several levels of employees to use them as measurement tools.
Business intelligence is all about getting the right information in front of key users at the most valuable time. To do this, dashboard software delivers at-a-glance summaries presented in a highly visual and intuitive format so managers can monitor progress toward goals. Because their attention is directed to the most important information they should monitor, managers can quickly identify problem areas and take corrective action. Immediacy is a crucial supporting element of any successful dashboard since users can only take the right action when they have timely information.
Let's take a closer look at dashboards, questions you should ask in a discovery stage before implementing dashboards, tying incentives to performance, and examples from companies that use dashboards.
WHY DASHBOARDS?
An article on dashboards might be an unlikely place for a discussion on ant colonies, yet it's a great way to think about this powerful performance metric and the impact it has on a company's culture. Ants have an innate concept of collaboration in the workplace; they all have a common understanding to work as a team. Each ant also has an apparent appreciation for what its role is within that group, so all are able to conceptualize working toward the same common goal.
Dashboards allow employees to...