Do you need to have KPIs on a company's dashboard usage?

Below is a continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of Best Practices for Key Performance Indicators. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): Most BI software provides that type of metric reporting, how many people log in each day, time spent, dashboards or reports created, et cetera. And it is a useful KPI best practice for finding your power users and your laggards. You can now even ask you power users to mentor the laggards.

Still the process-change approach is necessary to ensure adoption. That means making the tool the required common language at weekly departmental and monthly business review meetings. That way everybody becomes aware that they are responsible for certain of the measures. Their name is right next to them, and they have to make things happen to ensure their results match the expectations for those key metrics.

If people aren’t using a particular performance management dashboard or scorecard application, it probably means they don’t perceive anything of value out of it. When you show them their performance, and they realize that other people are seeing these KPIs, it will absolutely drive a behavioral change.

Beyond that, there remain some cases where a user might not be able to find the data that would be pertinent to what they are doing, that it wasn’t made available in the BI system. And you should periodically poll users for issues like this.

High-Visibility Usage Is Key

But overall the key is that high-visibility usage of the performance management system that will lead to highest adoption and usage levels. Somebody who is reluctant to adopt something that is new, or something that is intimidating, instead thinks, if I don’t look at this every day, I am going to be at a disadvantage when talking with my management or versus my peers who I might compete with for advancement in the enterprise.

This is all very important, and these are some of the reasons why we are seeing more and more interest in measuring BI, or business intelligence on business intelligence. Think about the manager whose performance is going down, and he is not even opening his dashboard. That kind of correlation is the ultimate goal here. Using the KPI software actively should lead to better operational management and the ability to more quickly affect deviations in performance. You’re beginning to see some advanced companies looking at this correlation in behavior and results, correlating corporate performance with the usage of metrics and analytics.