Tuesday, April 24, 2018

The Performance Dashboard of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a journey. A performance dashboard is a support decision instrument, gives instantaneous information about the organization's main drivers and decisions to be made.

Forward-looking organizations are on the journey of digital transformation. You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it. A well-designed dashboard is an effective management tool for enabling business leaders to make better decisions and lead change in the right direction. A well-designed digital management dashboard is an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance. A digital performance dashboard helps capture the progress being made or the important issues need to be taken care of, with the goal to improve management effectiveness.

The “essential” information presented in the dashboard has a clear alignment to the digital strategy that the audience is trying to execute or manage: A good start of a performance dashboard is to clarify business strategy, determine the main KPIs, analyze if the data is available and of good quality. It helps the management to align the operational activities with the strategic goals of the business. Digital organizations need to expand their capacity by improving operation efficiency and effectiveness with the KPIs to resolve problems. The very goal of digitalization is to improve business effectiveness, efficiency, and overall organizational maturity. Therefore, the effective measurement selected should be part of a link of cause-and-effect relationships. It needs to measure organizational efficiency, productivity. operating expenses, on-time delivery, inventory, write-off, quality, levels, or capacity planning. When those operational tasks are accomplished and measured well, the financial objectives and ultimately, the strategic value of the business can be realized seamlessly and visualized persuasively.

The continuous performance management dashboard is to track on a monthly basis the performance against the company results: Digital is the age of continuous delivery. The corporate performance management also needs to do a similar adjustment, from static, unidirectional and time-bound avatar to a more dynamic, continuous, and interactive state. The idea is to get away from the annual event based on stale data and poor record keeping. How about making real-time appraisals that take place consistently and can be tracked accordingly. The bottom line of return on investment (ROI) should be achieved and can be measured if there is a marked improvement in reducing/streamlining the processes, and managing the risks to an acceptable level by the enterprise management oversight. Map benefit/cost, progress status to business transformation initiatives. The performance dashboard will not only have a performance and goal review but also guarantee the alignment with corporate goals.


The effective performance dashboard with the appropriate visual design provides a brief but clear view about the most critical or pressuring management issues: It allows users to examine and perceive a large amount of information very quickly and use them to see the big picture or to identify any items that deserve attention and further analysis. Dashboards have to show dense business information on small spatial space that communicates unambiguously, simply and rapidly. If the user cannot understand what he/she is seeing at a glance, then something is surely wrong. Visualizing actionable data is meaningless if no one can see it act upon. They should be brief enough to keep focusing on the most strategic business initiatives and the most crucial information for making effective decisions. Because the trick is that the more information you expect to include in your first launch of a dashboard, the more you risk, both in terms of delayed implementation and in terms of loss of buy-in from stakeholders if the data quality is low. The intuitive visualization is also important factors in making execution dashboard user-friendly, minimize the overall number of metrics to share the logical business flow.

Digital transformation is a journey. A performance dashboard is a support decision instrument, gives instantaneous information about the organization's main drivers and the progress being made. Well defining the right set of metrics will never be an easy job, but always keep in mind of the “SIMPLICITY” principles, and do not confuse the means with the end.

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