The CIO's Dashboard

A comprehensive CIO dashboard should include the IT management quadrants with a combination of multiple management aspects:

A well-designed dashboard is an effective management tool to enable business leaders to make a better decision, from an IT management perspective; a dashboard should present the topics that you manage. CIOs shall ask themselves what are IT business objectives towards your organizational strategy. Then, translate it to smart KPIs. Smart is in a sense of how to cover all important business objectives, but not too many KPIs, to measure the progress, and not only the final result, to show the status at a glance without the need to drill down too much and so on. Typically, CIOs would need to remain on top of various parameters such as costs, production Issues (especially business-critical applications), risks, technology, customer, long-term business transformation, etc. A comprehensive CIO Dashboard should include the IT management quadrants with a combination of the following aspects:

 'Running the Business' aspect: It is always fundamental for IT to “keep the business lights on.” The CIO dashboard shall include information about the major systems performance (availability, reliability). The operational IT value can be measured through:

·         --Quality of Service: It can be broken up into server uptime, production issues, reliability, etc.

·         --Efficiency: It measures the effect of source code on performance and scalability. 

·         --Asset Information (IT inventory overview).

·         --IT Risk Management: Assess IT robustness - measures the level of risk and the likelihood of potential failures, the likelihood of potential risk due to poor coding and architectural practices.

Changing or transforming the business aspect: At the higher maturity level, IT has to go beyond just keeping the lights on. The strategic values are realized through IT initiatives or project portfolio, the business benefit and profitability from IT innovation and optimization.  

·         -Functional Size; a measurement of the software in terms of the amount of functionality it delivers (Function Points)

·         -Changeability: The effort necessary to modify the source code, affecting time to market.

·         -Transformability – the effort necessary to map project benefit/cost, progress status to business transformation initiatives.

Cost optimization aspects: Based on the variety of IT industry surveys, IT cost optimization is on the top priority list of the CIO's agenda across the vertical sectors. Thus, the CIO's dashboard can highlight some significant IT cost and finance information (budget, expenses, service costs, etc), and keep track of the overall IT financial health.

·      --IT operational cost, financials, technical debt - a calculation of the cost to fix structural quality problems,

·       --Vendor cost - monthly expenses, license cost, procurement cost

·       -- HR Information and cost -salary grades, training investments, headcount & other relevant information about the IT team).

Customer satisfaction aspect: The CIO's dashboard should also showcase the end users or business users’ satisfaction scores. It's not necessary that SLAs which are being tracked and complied with are converting into higher customer satisfaction levels. Even all SLAs being met, the customer's satisfaction scores are still down, The dashboard can help showcase the disconnection. Thus, customer satisfaction score can be part of the CIO dashboard as IT needs to transform from an operationally driven support function into outside-in, customer-focused business partner.

·        ---Internal customer Information, such as IT resources consumption, growing tendencies, main complaints, SLAs, etc.

·        -- End-user information, such as customer’s touch point digitalization, NPS, customer experience.

·        -- Overall customer satisfaction base on the information from multiple sources, departments or markets

Therefore, an effective CIO's dashboard should be brief enough to keep focus on the most strategic business initiatives and the most fundamental IT functionality as well; to present relevant KPIs and metric information to make decisions and act on them; to have an intuitive graphical display that is well laid-out and easy to navigate; and to display the information that can be customized and categorized to meet the CIO’s specific needs, in order to manage a high-performing IT organization effortlessly.