Dashboards for Public and Private Sector Use

Dashboards seem to be all the rage these days and it's easy to understand why. In a world where instant and voluminous information is the standard, data dashboards allow users to take in a large amount of data in a short amount of time. My own company recently developed a new Dashboard tool because that seems to be where basic data analysis is headed. But a quick Google search on "data dashboards" reveals a myriad of tools and articles for various dashboard solutions. One question I'd like to pose is what makes for a good data dashboard and how can that be used in the context of an overall performance management program? Can dashboards be used to better inform an agency on performance? I'll follow up with a few postings on this topic but I look forward to any comments.

Performance Management Software Tools

This is an open question to all readers. What kinds of performance management software tools do you use in your agency or organization and can you provide the names of software tools? We have a tool we've developed called Gov-Metrics but I'm curious what others are using to assist them in gathering and reporting data. I imagine most are internal or custom solutions. Heck, I think most groups just use spreadsheets! For human services groups I know that Social Solutions has a great tool. Please chime in with feedback on the tool(s) used by your organization.

Measurement and Managing

You can't manage what you don't measure! If an organization believes that adage and decides to measure, it must also leverage software to increase its chances to manage successfully. I recommend that organizations take a three-pronged approach to ensure that they are not only measuring, but measuring with confidence!

The first ‘prong’ is what I call, “Identification”. What is being identified? What the organization should be measuring. It should measure those activities or results that are important to successfully achieving its goals. Once these are identified, they will be defined and measured to ensure that progress is made toward the organization’s goals.

Software does not currently offer much help in identifying what needs to be measured, but it does provide a mechanism to capture and document the metrics that will be measured. It also provides a central repository for this information as well as a search engine for locating them.

The second ‘prong’ is collection. This is the entering of raw data that happens at a defined interval: Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, etc. The data is typically entered by organization workers and prone to error. Workers can also enter descriptions of missed targets as well as narratives that provide insight into improvements.

Software offers a lot of help here. It can provide a clean web based interface to allow the organization workers to enter the data. It can offer a myriad of validations to reduce error rates. It can even import the data from existing systems so that data entry is minimized and/or eliminated.

The final ‘prong’ is where transparency is realized and provided to the organization’s constituents. I call it, “Dissemination”. There is an expectation that the data be tallied and distributed to interested parties allowing them to have a more complete picture of the activities and performance of the organization.

This is where the right software really shines! It can provide visually appealing, clear, informative reports that allow user interaction, filtering, sorting, exporting, etc. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, it can also provide graphical representations of the data so that trends can easily be spotted. Management can use these visual outcomes to assess performance and set goals for improvement.

Without the data gathered from performance measures—particularly those tied to the organization’s goals—it can be difficult to judge if an organization is being managed efficiently. Organizations should use software to take a three-pronged approach to measurement: Identification, Collection, and Dissemination. When they do, they will be well on their way to measuring with confidence!