Can you have a single dashboard cover both executive level metrics as well as detailed operational KPI’s?

Below is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Best Practices for Key Performance Indicators." The presenter is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): It’s probably not a good idea to mix up the audiences and intentions of dashboards. It doesn’t make sense for senior executives to drill down too granularly. Do they have time to really look at the details of every marketing campaign. Would they understand what they are looking at? Summary-level views are best for them.

For instance, in customer service, how many complaints are coming in every day. What are the main sources, the call center, the agents, the field reps? Those are the summary level kind of key performance indicators that management needs to see.

It’s always a good idea for an operational employee to understand the impact of their own operational performance metrics, the ones they are managed by, on the overall goals of the company to understand how they play a part in the company’s success. But they don’t need to be seeing on a daily basis how those executive level metrics are performing.

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Let’s talk about the difference between the presentation layer of KPIs and the back-end. There is a very tight relationship between performance management and master data management, meaning if you’re defining the key metrics top to bottom that will help us perform better as a company, those metrics better be right. They better be accurate. Make sure the quality of the data, the integrity of the data, is there to make sure that performance is being managed properly.

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"You actually use more business intelligence capabilities. So in between the execution phase and the final evaluation, you’re constantly tracking and monitoring your performance so you can tune your execution. That’s where business intelligence with dashboards for analysis and monitoring come in. And in between the evaluation phase and incorporating your learnings or findings and adapting your strategy, you need to do some in-depth analytics.

That’s the more traditional forecasting or predictive analytics as well as things like data mining. So there is a piece that is more business intelligence as it relates to the management system, and then there is a piece that is more performance management, and you couple them together.

After some months of active use of the platform, go back to the users and find out where they get value out of the system, what they’ve been using it for, and start to use those thought leaders, the folks that have been the most aggressive users getting this value out of it. Use them, perhaps, as a way to add the additional performance management capabilities into the organization."


- Mark Flaherty, Chief Marketing Officer, InetSoft Technology
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