Does your dashboard make you feel like you had too much caffeine? Just as car dashboards have gone from the exquisite simplicity of the original Volkswagen Beetle's speedometer, odometer and fuel gauge to current awe-inspiring displays of global positioning systems, iPod docking stations, scrolling message boards and voice recognition, so too have corporate performance dashboards moved beyond a few basics of delayed cash flow information.
Today's financial dashboards represent a real-time bonanza of constantly updating and recalculating data feeds that, if not well conceived, can literally drive an executive to distraction, according to technology experts.
It's a little like what could happen to your stock portfolio if you watch too much of CNBC's Squawk Box: After hearing hour after hour of reports about corporate hiccups and home runs, any investor has to wonder why he or she isn't out there trading right that minute. In other words, too many dashboard alerts can make an executive act prematurely based on an aberration rather than a trend. "A big issue is inadvertently injecting nervousness into the system," says Wolfgang Koester, CEO of dashboard vendor FiREapps. "If you set the tolerances too tight on a dashboard, you can set up this situation where everyone is getting hit with alerts that they have to respond to."
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Former Microsoft Corp. CFO John Connors agrees: "It's analogous to early systems-management products, which [put out] so many alerts and so much information that it was impossible to handle it all. The key is to have dashboards that are top-down, clear and tied to objectives and performance measures."
So how does a company design a system that tells each executive exactly what that manager needs to know and nothing more? Starting with the most senior users, "the first step is to decide who needs a dashboard, and then to figure out what data is important given each dashboard user's role in the decision-making process," says Doug Barton, vice president of product marketing at Cognos.
Connors, now a partner in the Bellevue, Wash.-based venture capital firm Ignition Partners, also recommends having top executives develop a clear view of how they want to run their business and which metrics are key, so that these become the focus of the initial dashboards. "If executives leave development of the dashboards to lower level managers or to the IT department, you end up with massive amounts of data, information overload and a disaster," says Connors, whose firm is a principal investor in FiREapps. "For every successful dashboard project, there are two or three that were unsuccessful, and when they fail, a huge amount of time and money can get wasted."
Cognos' Barton says that this requires a substantial degree of customization according to the job description. For example, he says, a treasurer might want to be able to see a company's cash requirements for the quarter on a rolling basis, so the treasury dashboard might need to have current revenue, receivables, collection experience and predicted collections for each payer and purchaser. It should then have the ability to net all that data out to give a surplus or deficit that would need to be invested or borrowed. A controller's dashboard, in contrast, might want to access surpluses and deficits in departmental budgets, so that a surplus in one department could be made available to another.
FiREapps' Koester says that the way to establish whether a dashboard will be useful is to see whether a particular executive or department is getting the same questions again and again. "That's a sign that you need to get that information provided to [that manager] easily," he says. The other situation where a dashboard can be useful is where there are multiple disconnected businesses, and an executive is getting deluged with spreadsheets, e-mails and faxes. A dashboard can consolidate this information and drill down for the most necessary nuggets.
Paxar, a White Plains, N.Y.-based provider of merchandising systems for the retail and apparel industry, installed a dashboard system recently. "Dashboard programs give us the ability to see on one screen information that, in the past, could only be had by making three or four calls," says Timothy M. Winston, Paxar's treasurer. "In the case of our foreign exchange dashboard, it provides a way to ensure that our banks are being competitive with the rest of the market."
That's not to say that only routinely used information should be included on a dashboard. As Cognos' Barton notes, the oil light on that old VW dashboard may never go on, "but if it does, it's urgent!" It's not so much a case of keeping it simple for an executive as it is keeping it specific to that executive.
Axentis Inc., a provider of governance, risk and compliance solutions, released an enhanced version of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) based Axentis Enterprise application. The update includes more powerful reporting and analytic capabilities to allow a broader set of users access to data on audits, testing, controls monitoring and ongoing assessments. New features make it easier for staff to select, filter, analyze and publish data, as well as create graphical dashboards for executives and management. "Customers are pushing more responsibility [for Sarbanes-Oxley] to the business unit owners," says Roger Bottum, vice president of marketing at Axentis. "This helps users make SOX compliance more of a normal part of what business owners do everyday, as opposed to a bolt-on."
Open Text Corp., a provider of enterprise content management solutions, released a powerful e-mail management tool capable of tracking, searching and archiving up to seven million e-mails per day. The offering was developed with Sun Microsystems Inc., but can work with all major storage platforms. The solution is targeted at large organizations looking to reduce their search and discovery costs related to litigation and regulatory requests, and for general compliance and regulatory requirements. It contains sophisticated search capabilities to allow users to find all necessary documents related to a subject. "The hard part is not just finding the documents but working on the connections between documents," says Patrick Thompson, director of worldwide strategic alliances at Open Text. The system also contains disposition management capabilities.
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