A fascinating study by Compass shows that BI dashboards are failing. No surprise there then. As always, the interesting bits are in the detail:
…a tendency to develop too many metrics with no clear purpose of how to apply them. One operational dashboard observed contained over 90 metrics…
…allowing available data or tools – rather than business objectives – to drive the process, rendering the initiative irrelevant to performance issues.
…many of these projects fail due to the difficulty in culling data out of various departments within an organization.
…dashboard initiatives aren’t a sufficiently high priority to warrant the involvement of senior staff.
No big surprises there though I’m not sure I put all the responsibility on end user organisations. It’s easy to forget that part of the sales process is about setting expectations. And software sales people are very good at setting expectations at ridiculous levels.
John Stockdyk has this to say:
It will come as little surprise to accountants to learn that more than two-thirds of the survey sample used Excel to build their dashboards.
Anyone who knows me will also know I’ve waged a long term campaign to have Excel ripped out of every accounting reporting routine for many years. But the biggest issue for me comes when Compass exec Tom Kawamoto is quoted as saying:
“In many instances, dashboards simply produced numbers every month that aren’t tied to anything people are doing,†says Kawamoto. “There’s no context to the metrics and nothing is done about them, so people lose interest in the dashboard. An effective dashboard uses metrics that make sense and are meaningful to stakeholders and to the business.â€
[My emphasis added] This so obviously represents a case for the introduction of social computing tools that I’m surprised no-one has mentioned this point. Context is crucial to making sense of figures. It’s another reason why I think persistent, preference driven search rendered as a widget that includes dashboard style data is so important. For any business. Of any size.
Technorati Tags: Attensa, business intelligence, innovation, Corporate performance management, real-time reporting
