InetSoft Technology Resources & Articles: Tracking Business Performance Indicators

Do you need to track business performance indicators? InetSoft offers software for performance monitoring dashboards and balanced scorecards that can be easily deployed and used. View a demo and read reviews.

Scorecard Measures - See how to create scorecard measures that you can embed into your Web application. InetSoft specializes in OEM'ing its scorecard technology to other developers. View a demo and download a free eval copy. Consider the following script. Note: Report script that modifies 'graph' should be placed at the element level. See Adding Element-Level Script. This creates a basic bar chart displaying the dimensions 'State' and 'Quantity 1'. To add the measure 'Quantity 2' to the chart as line element, follow the steps below: 1. Create a new LineElement to represent the graph of 'Quantity 2' vs. 'State'. A legend is created automatically. To modify the legend, make changes to the VisualFrame's LegendSpec property. See Changing Legend Properties...

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Scorecards Are Not Only For Senior Management - The number seven stupid measurement mistake is a lot of companies have scorecards only for senior management, and they present these to the lower level employees, but you find their eyes glaze over, and they are just not that interested because they really can’t see how anything they do on a daily basis makes any difference in the overall measures because there are four or five levels above them. So scorecards need to be developed for all levels of employees, not just for senior management. That doesn’t mean not communicating the senior management scorecards to employees. It means they have their own metrics that tell them how they are doing at their jobs. In fact, many companies have found that performance and employee morale went up after giving people daily and weekly feedback on their performance using scorecards. Number eight, I used to say that your scorecard should tell you what’s going on in your organization, and what I’ve learned over the years is that your scorecard might be a lot better if you included a couple of external metrics. What’s going on in the world might have a big impact on your decision making in your organization...

Second Stupid Performance Measurement Mistake - The second stupid performance measurement mistake is using annual metrics. We don’t have any of these in the finance area. We track performance daily, weekly, sometimes even hourly. You can’t run an organization by measuring performance once a year, but that’s how we measure things like customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction as we do a once a year survey. An annual metric has no place on your scorecard. Annual metrics are good for studies but unless you can measure performance at least quarterly, it doesn’t need to be on your scorecard. It’s something you track to supplement your scorecard data. A trend going on in industry right now, and some government folks are starting to pick up on this as well, is a metric they call Net Promoter Score. It’s a fancy name for a one-question survey. On a scale of 1 to 10, would you recommend us as a great place to shop, or would you recommend this as a good car to buy? The problem with these one-question surveys is that if you end up getting an average of four on a ten point scale, you have no idea why. So the data is not usable. You can’t use it to solve problems. You can’t use it to figure out what you’re doing well. The rule of this is that it’s simple, and the idea is more people will answer one question than if you send them 20 or 30 questions...

Should KPIs Be Selected Bottom-Up or Top-Down? - This is one of the most challenging issues in business intelligence. It’s unlike any other software segment, where you can define your requirements, and you can define your metrics, take CRM or ERP, for instance, and you will probably be OK with what you set up for a couple of years with just minor changes. But business intelligence and performance management are completely different. Because by design, you go through the regular cycle of defining your metrics and defining how you will source and calculate them. You actually develop them and roll them out, and you test them. You put them in front of the business users, and after a few months have passed since the beginning of the BI project, guess what happens. The people who asked for those metrics are gone. Or the work has changed. Or you have just acquired another company. Or you have just gone global. Or you have a new competitor. The world where you create your KPIs is very complex and challenging, and often changing. Sometimes if you use the top-down method of planning KPIs, by the time you finish defining your goals and objectives, and the metrics you need to monitor on a daily basis to understand where you are against those goals and objectives, you may end up creating metrics that you don’t have the data to support. On the other hand, if you use the bottom-up approach, where you first inventory all the data that you do have from all the operational systems, perhaps collected in a data warehouse, and then you try to guess what to measure, you can end up with a confusing mess...

SQL Server Dashboard Tool - InetSoft offers visualization driven dashboard tools compatible with SQL Server housed data and many other data sources. InetSoft's Web-based dashboard application is 100% Java and enables quick development and easy deployment. As more businesses look for answers in the cloud and explore database virtualization, the location of data sources may change. However, the need to display data in visually appealing and easy-to-interpret reports will not change. In fact, today's business users and consumers demand highly graphical and interactive views into their data. InetSoft has been making sophisticated SQL reporting tools for business users since 1996...

Using KPIs to Monitor Usage and Make Improvements - Even at a simpler level that tracking usage by person, you should be asking questions about usability of your KPI software. Are the ways that these dashboards are presenting these key performance indicators, are they being presented in a useful way? It’s one thing to do a short survey or just talk to your dashboard users, it’s another to create metrics on them. How many clicks does it take to for somebody to get to a particular metric? Are people spending more time really looking for information rather than using the information. That’s a great indicator of a well-designed performance management system. Are people trying to refresh their metrics to get the latest data, and then they are giving up and close the dashboard because it takes too long to load. So all sorts of very specific BI usage metrics about the use of the metrics software can be used to make their dashboards more effective. We’ve added a great deal of emphasis on this in our latest release. We’ve added a usage monitoring facility in our BI and performance management application. In a lot of cases, whether it was IT or the business that drove the initial roll-out, sometimes emphasis is placed on certain metrics and certain data elements. The monitoring capability can tell you that those elements that you put most of the emphasis on are or aren’t being utilized. And conversely you can learn what data or dashboards people are using the most that might lead to surprises or point to areas for future development...

Tangible Return on Investment - So how do companies generate a tangible ROI from business analytics? This is a question that I frequently get from the end users that I talk to. Obviously, for this particular discussion, we are talking about ROI from two different perspectives, again from the perspective of the ultimate end user of the technology, but then also the ROI from the perspective of a software provider looking to add these capabilities. I think Nick did a great job of talking about that type of perspective of ROI and certainly, I would look for any other thoughts that he has on that. But from the end user perspective, when it comes to ROI, it’s obviously something that is difficult to quantify sometimes, but if you look at the legitimately tangible performance improvements that you can create, they are really fall into two different categories: the growth side and the efficiency side...

Technology, Employees, and Organizations - Now, one of the things that is a bit surprising is that almost as many organizations are using smartphones as are using laptops. Some of the organizations using smartphones who are using Mobile BI are also using laptops and Mobile BI, too. Something else that’s apparent is that the use of all four devices here - laptops, smartphones, tablets and notebooks. The best performance companies have the widest mix. And I think it's clear that many organizations will be using multiple device types for mobile BI for the foreseeable future. So a mobile BI solution that works on multiple devices is going to be key to achieving a successful and uneventful rollout. If we look at smartphones in particular, I think there are probably four points to make. First, despite all the buzz around the Apple devices, one year from now there will still be more organizations using BlackBerry for mobile BI than Apple. And I think that’s true in part due to their strong corporate presence RIM already has and also due to the robust security those devices have already had built in...

Technology for Performance Management - InetSoft’s innovative performance management system and tools have delivered and continue to offer management reporting, scorecards, and dashboards that are easy to configure and deploy. Its business intelligence software platform, Style Intelligence, focuses on enterprise reporting and performance management...

The Information Value Chain - Companies picking embedded BI approach will have higher levels of user satisfaction when it comes to business intelligence, something that really helps them arm those users with the analytical capability that they need and generate those business opportunities as a result. So what is it that separates these embedded BI users? Why are they achieving these improvements in operational performance and some of those metrics that we just looked at? From a process standpoint, from an organizational maturity standpoint, what are the things that they have in place, what are they more likely to do that enables them to leverage business intelligence to the fullest extent? What are the things that’s interesting, again frequently comes up as correlating with improved performance is the concept that these initiatives are driven by the line of business managers themselves rather than having the technical leaders take the solutions and deliver them to the business users without really understanding what the needs are, the business users are generating those requirements organically and going to IT with, you know hey I need the ability to optimize my trucking payloads, I need all of these different analytical capabilities...

What is the Process for Building a KPI Dashboard? - You should start with a top-down approach, work with senior management to find out what they think the key performance indicators are. “Key” is important in order to come up with a finite number of truly important metrics. Eight to ten is usually the right number. They should be chosen because the reflect “Performance,” and they are the ones that employees can affect with their actions and decisions. Once you have those, that will germinate the development of deeper level KPIs at the operational and departmental levels. You can then break those measures out and rank them on a couple of criteria. First which are the most important for getting the results they need to get? Second, you have to determine what is collectible. A lot of times companies start out having already a third of their desired KPIs being measured and monitored...

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