Dashboards At Eden

Dashboards at Eden, Inc.

John Strong, CEO of Eden, Inc., championed business dashboards for improving revenue growth, increasing margins, communicating accurate estimates to the financial community and improving innovation and quality. Dashboards are intended to help John build an organizational culture where there is performance visibility. He wants employees to be held accountable for their actions. Eden deployed Hyperion dashboards using tools that manage the flow of data to customized reports that provide top level executives with relevant views into the enterprise. Inna Karlova is one of those executives. As VP of Sales, Ms. Karlova is able to drill down into detailed sales information by region, territory, salesperson, etc. COO Ken Edwards utilizes a dashboard that provides insights into ongoing operations. His dashboard also incorporates models that support and simulate the impact of different decision scenarios. For example, he can simulate the impact of switching suppliers, and he can even see – in real-time – ongoing assembly line operations. Sue Change, VP of Finance, is clear about how difficult it is to monitor macro and micro financials at the same time – especially in real-time. As finance VP, she does much more than managing P&L reporting. She must address communicating with markets, handling debt, managing cashflows and foreign exchange rates and hedging. All of these must be taken into account in her efforts to build solid forecasts. Sue’s dashboard at Eden is one of the few that include a graphical or spatial dashboard capability. CIO David Lee’s dashboard components are mostly about IT project management. He can view a project’s status, and that status can be shared over the web with consultants, auditors and other external partners. David especially appreciates the ‘self-service’ nature of sharable dashboards, the instant insights they provide the business side of the house, and their relatively low cost of ownership. He uses his dashboard for holding people accountable in three areas: monthly outage management, IT investment performance and compliance project status reporting. Nancy Brunnings is Eden’s Director of HR. Her dashboards have been recently updated to reflect the collection of data from the biannual staff satisfaction survey. Nancy uses workforce planning solutions to help in understanding the impact of adding people to teams. She is even able to track head counts and turnover ratios.

All was going well at Eden, until the newly implemented dashboards were used to pinpoint a problem – a drop in sales. Several VPs immediately used their dashboards to come to the conclusion that delivery problems under the control of COO Edwards were the root cause. Since Edward’s dashboards are so new, he took the blame. (1) But was it really his fault? (2) Could his dashboard provide extra-enterprise information in a timely fashion? (3) Was it always going to be the case the he was going to be the one to catch the heat? (4) What if the sales force was simply overselling the production capability? (5) In order to keep costs low, there were frequent supplier switches – didn’t that mean that late deliveries would be the norm rather than the exception? Edwards wondered if his aspirations to follow in Strong’s footsteps were going out the window.

Part A.

John Strong was talking with his friend, a recent ASU MSIM graduate, Pat Webster. Webster was asking about the dashboard situation and forwarded John the following:

Silo metrics

7/18/2005

Where exactly did the term "silo" come from, anyway?

Organizational silos are Bad Things. They create barriers to getting work done. But why silo? What does a building used to store grain or a nuclear missile have to do with branches of the organizational chart? But then, I wonder how agribusiness executives respond to the idea of breaking down their silos. For that matter, I worry about using "lowest common denominator" when we should be saying "greatest common factor," so what's that tell you?

Speaking of the relationship between mathematics and organizational silos, let's talk about dashboards, business metrics, and how they should and shouldn't fit together.

"Metric" is ConsultantSpeak for "measure." Some use "metric" to refer to the formula and "measure" to the result of each act of measurement. Since the ontological battle against "metric" is long since lost, let's agree to accept this distinction.

Good metrics start with goals and end with fine tuning, and not, as some consultants lazily suggest, with industry benchmarks or other forms of meaningless tradition. Figure out what you're trying to achieve, develop an observational way to determine whether you're making progress toward it -- preferably in numeric terms -- and then make sure there's no way to manipulate the measures so they improve while the actual situation deteriorates.

A popular addition to metrics lore is the dashboard. Unlike "silo," "dashboard" is a useful metaphor, which is to say it nicely illustrates the point. When you want to know how your car is doing, the dashboard tells you, at a glance, whether your car is healthy and progressing at the right speed toward your destination. A well-designed business dashboard helps you understand how healthy your organization is, and whether it's progressing at a fast enough pace toward its destination.

So far, so good. But when designing dashboards, most consultants, and as a result many managers, fall into a trap: They think the point of metrics is to Hold People Accountable, and so they design a business dashboard whose gauges are each tied to a branch of the organizational chart, or where individual manager results roll up to the whole organization's results. Since you get what you measure, the inevitable happens -- each manager does whatever it takes to move his or her measures, almost always hampering the ability of other managers to achieve their metrical responsibilities. Bad dashboards, that is, cause silos (which, if you have a bizarre and twisted mind, means the bad use of a good metaphor causes a bad metaphor).

Criticizing other consultants is fun, and possibly good for business, but knowing how to build a bad dashboard doesn't do much to help you build a good one.

When our team works with clients on this subject we start with our handy-dandy IT Effectiveness Framework, which

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