Below is a continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft in July 2010 on the topic of Best Practices for Key Performance Indicators. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, Vice President of Marketing at InetSoft.
Mark Flaherty (MF): For years people have been talking about driving BI throughout the organization. But if you pay attention to where the priorities are, they are in performance management. When BI gets down into the operational areas, that’s where you get the greatest ROI and the biggest impact.
Historically the management systems and the management dashboards have been useful in guiding management decisions, but what they cannot do at the highest levels is change behavior within the organization. Having the management dashboards and scorecards is great, but when you bring it down to the call center operations, and let people see the metrics, how they rank with their peers, that’s where you’re creating the positive or negative reinforcement feedback loop that you may have learned about from your psychology and human behavior courses.
When you look at executive dashboards, they are designed to support strategic decision-making. But when you are down in the trenches, first of all, the world is moving at lightning speed. So not only do you have to make decisions quickly, but you have to be able to adjust your metrics very quickly. So agility in performance management, agility in business intelligence is key. In terms of deploying the key metrics and being able to change and update them is very important.
The trend long term for performance management, even business intelligence, for that matter, is allowing us to do more. It’s allowing users to do more for themselves. Nowadays there's a buzzword for it: self-service BI. Certainly we’re a big proponent of that. But a key is to spend less time within the solution, and get more value. That ends up being the perennial challenge.
That's why there is so much left to be done. With other BI solutions, they still require a fair amount of training to get up to speed on them. Therefore companies using them have needed fairly skilled individuals. They have had to invest in training programs to give them the skills. So that is changing somewhat with easier-to-use solutions like ours.
Instead of forcing user to adapt to the technology, we’re trying to make it as intuitive as possible, using point-and-click controls, going heavy with visualization as a means to explore the data, et cetera." - Mark Flaherty, Chief Marketing Officer, InetSoft Technology
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