Back in May of last year, I wrote the following post, which in essence said “There’s a lot of talk about dashboards, but I’ve encountered very few myself.”
Well, while attending the Aptify Users Conference a few weeks ago, one of the speakers was demonstrating the dashboards available in the Aptify product (which are, quite frankly, pretty slick). But the speaker went on to say “This is one of the most underutilized portions of our system.”
So I’ll ask again, why aren’t more associations using dashboards? Do they not see the value? Or is it just to difficult to get them working correctly?
In my experience, dashboards are a management tool that an organization must evolve into. Dashboards are good at showing at a glance the information that executive management needs to monitor progress toward or maintenance of a business performance goal, and to effect business changes that make an organization more effective.
Studies by industry analysts show that the evolution into effective use of dashboard technology can sometimes take a year or more. There is an iterative process, a feedback loop, by which an organization first uses BI tools to discover what data it has that is useful for business performance management, and institutionalize those reports and data into daily, weekly or monthly business processes. Through that feedback loop, the organization learns what data is effective in monitoring as key performance indicators for the business, what additional data needs to be captured, and what data is meaningless. Ultimately, only those metrics which are valuable to measuring the health of the organization become worthwhile to build into dashboards. As an organization matures, the KPIs evolve and change. What is an indicator of performance today may not matter tomorrow, or may become so ingrained in the organizations culture over time that it is less important to monitor through a dashboard after a while.
In my view, many associations still have yet to define what those goals are, or don’t have a culture that is oriented towards business performance management. Wes, you often touch on this issue with your comments that state, “it depends on what you want to accomplishâ€. Those organizations that know what they want to accomplish will more likely succeed with dashboards to help them accomplish it.
I agree with Dan’s points. I think organizations need to be at a certain level management maturity and have an understanding of business-technology alignment before the concept of a BI dashboard can realized. In addition, commitment in both $ and time are then required to successfully implement, maintain and iterate the performance management tool.
Any readers of this blog who’ve encountered dashboards in non-profits; I’d be interested in hearing a) are they actively used and b) a description of their characteristics. What metrics are tracked? Is data collection and analysis automated or manual?
I agree with both points, but it still confounds me as to why associations that have been using the same system for many years (which implies some level of success and maturity) are not embracing dashboards.