Dashboards as a Marketing Strategy

I know there are several organizations that build dashboards for their process improvement initiatives. Any change initiative such as ISO 9001, CMMI, or Balanced Scorecard requires support from the entire organization. Hence marketing the concepts, process and the benefits of the change initiative is essential to reduce resistance to change. Using dashboards to convey the progress can create tremendous interest and involvement from the entire organization.

You can use a dashboard not just for process improvements, but for any service you provide, to create a powerful impact.

What are the characteristics of a good dashboard?

Seth Godin, a marketing genius and author of several best sellers, has made the following observations on dashboards.

1. If you can add a digital dashboard to your service, do it.
2. If you can make the dashboard public, it gets more powerful.
3. Highlight data that changes behavior.
4. Allow the user to highlight the information that matters to them.

Do you need a dashboard?

Some business owners say they have been running the organization without any dashboard and yet successful. Some think they have to spend additional time to update the scorecard. Some others perceive dashboard as a costly tool. Some organizations tried, but still struggling to meaningfully measure what is important.

In early 90’s, when the ISO 9000 wave started hitting the Indian IT industry, the same issues were there and Project Managers were managing their projects without a proper project plan. Project Planning and Tracking process was very ad-hoc and the success of projects often depended on the heroism of the project managers. I was managing a team of 50 at that time, yet couldn’t get an MS Project, because it was not popular and it was costly.

Today, a typical C-Level Executive (CXO) manages several strategic initiatives that are critical for the organization to create and maintain their competitive edge. They may continue to use tools such as project plans, status reports, budgets to manage their operations. With these tools, they could get swamped in flood of data and operational issues; they may lose focus on their strategic priorities.

We expect every project manager to have a project plan. Similarly, Scorecard/Dashboard is a tool that every CXO must have. In fact every role in the organization should have an associated dashboard that has some metrics corresponding to their key goals. My belief is that, 5 years from now, if a CXO doesn’t have a dashboard, he will be out of the game! Period.

Do you know that CXO Dashboards can help you to arrive at scorecards/dashboards for every critical role in your organization?

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Federal IT Dashboard - Changing the Way the Govt. Works

The Federal IT Dashboard created a sensation when it got 20 million hits in the first two weeks of its release. “Dashboards can bring transparency and accountability“. saya Vivek Kundra , Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Obama Administration.

In a recent post ‘Changing the way Washington works ’, Vivek says “From San Francisco to the United Kingdom, there is a global movement to share public sector data to unleash the creativity of citizens, drive transparency and ensure accountability. Data transparency can spur economic, scientific, and educational innovation by making it easier to build applications, conduct analysis, and perform research.”

Last month, I was talking to the Chief of Staff of a US County, when he visited Chennai. He met members of the C-Star Consortium and a few others and was exploring opportunities for collaboration. He mentioned that there is a public pressure being built to have dashboards for more Government services in US. People want more transparency and want to know how their tax dollars are spent in ensuring an efficient administration.

As more Governments plan to transform their administration, here lies an opportunity for the IT industry to participate in it. With each County having a budget running into billions of dollars, this could be just a tip of an iceberg. With a surge in demand from companies and government organizations for dashboards, this could even dwarf the Y2K opportunity that came by about a decade back to the IT industry.

Being a pioneer in building sophisticated business dashboards (details), CXO Dashboards would certainly leverage some of these opportunities, especially the ones that demand significant innovation in architecting dashboards. I intend to share with you the insights from these projects, as the future unfolds.