Performance Management Product Information from InetSoft

This is a table of contents of useful product information about, and benefits of, InetSoft's performance management software:

9 Important E-commerce KPIs That Show the Real Success of an Online Store - In the very competitive landscape of e-commerce, measuring success goes beyond just tracking sales figures. For online retailers, they need to dig further into KPIs to understand how an organization is performing and why. The KPIs are essential indicators that shed light on different dimensions of online store operations. This article will examine 9 essential e-commerce KPIs beyond revenue which are a true reflection of the real success of an online store. A conversion rate is a key metric, which gauges the share of site visitors that end up as buyers. Conversion rate indicates the success and effectiveness of the website in convincing the visitors to be customers. Calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of completed transactions by the total number of website visitors to yield a value of 100. Tracking and improving the conversion rate will make it possible to notice shortcomings in the sales funnel, website design, and user-friendliness....

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100 Different Performance Tracking Software Packages - There are over 100 different performance tracking software packages. So avoid this trap. Just because balanced scorecard is in the title doesn’t mean you are going to have a balanced scorecard, does it? A piece of software is not going to give you a balanced scorecard. Avoid this one, too. Just give it to the planning shop. It’s their job. Let them do it. Let them show us what they can build on their own, wrong answer. Okay, quick success, early success should celebrated frequently. Remember what we are looking for here. Remember the objectives on the strategy map, cross out the word ‘objective’ and put “desired behavior changes” because that’s really what you are trying to get at here. You are trying to get at changing hearts and minds as a piece of your strategy, so that you can influence behaviors. We like to use a little checklist to get people started thinking. We always start an engagement with something like this, here are those strategic components I have talked about with Mr. or Ms. CEO. Which one do you think is developed? Which one do you think is partially developed? Which ones haven’t you worked on, yet...

Ability to Accelerate Business Performance Improvements - And that leaves me at the last topic here. It’s about the ability to accelerate business performance improvements and the ability to continuously repeat them. It’s like the old saying, ‘rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.’ It’s a continuous process improvement. The key idea is the ability to document processes and understand them. This helps ensure the building of a knowledge base that can be passed on. Next, be sure to provide the visibility so that you can understand the reporting and understand the impact that your changes are having. Open the community of influencers. The more people who are invested in the project the better. The last recommendation has to do with learning from others. Some times much of the new innovation may not happen within your organization, but you need to be able to pull in that information and that content. That includes experiences that are happening outside the organization.Here comes the sales pitch. When it comes to information reporting, InetSoft is uniquely able to provide a unified view of multiple processes that are tracked in multiple operational data sources...

Advice for Achieving Success in a Law Firm’s Performance Management Project - I think another piece of advice for achieving success in a law firm’s performance management project is to establish quarterly reviews. We put out the data and the reports each quarter, and then at the end of that the quarter we get them to report in on how they’re progressing. So, they have a progression agreement. They say, these are KPI’s we are focused on. This is how we’ve worked on some of them, and this how we’ve improved. And that review is involves a managing partner and a deputy managing partner. They are reporting to those. We sit down for probably about an hour for each cluster, going through the performance metrics. And I think it’s a key for achieving success because the attoroneys know the review are going to happen, so they work on the goals. And the reviews are done at a fairly high level in terms of seniority. We’ve seen the actions. It’s not just a bunch of talk. They’re solving the issues. New issues are actioned upon because I think that the guys know that they’re going to report on it and be accountable for it. So, there are a lot of factors that are making it successful project for us. Mark: I certainly agree a lot of your points there, the idea of getting help to make your dashboards look as nice as possible. It’s just a brilliant idea. Involving the various groups, getting collaboration and getting agreement ahead of time and helping, that works out. Do you review the performance management dashboards on an ongoing basis, and learn from that in order to apply improvements to them? Even the idea of aiming towards the average for underperformers is smart because as everybody gets better the target keep raising higher automatically...

Advice for the Process of Defining KPIs - When you are getting down to the departmental level, the metrics become very specific. And sometimes they need help figuring out what are those metrics. Some industries like government, education, and healthcare share this kind of information, what the standard metrics they are using, because they’re not in hyper-competitive marketplaces. It’s a little more challenging for other businesses such as in financial services. Sometimes a key metric can be a secret way for tracking the performance of their business or their marketing campaigns, so they’re reluctant to share that knowledge or methodology. There have been some consortiums formed, and there are some good Web sites collecting the definitions of industry-specific KPIs. One I can recommend it KPI Library at http://kpilibrary.com/. There is no easy answer. I think once you get started measuring and tracking the obvious performance indicators, and you immerse yourself in them, begin to puzzle in your own head what else could be measured, what other event or activity might cause the indicator you’re already watching to go up or down. That will lead you in the direction of the leading indicators...

After the Balanced Scorecard - When companies talk about the before the balance scorecard and after the balance scorecard, and it makes much more sense to hear it in their words than it does in my marketing pitch as to what the benefits were. They are going to refer to the strategy map which is the heart of their balance scorecard, and they are going to talk about bubbles. Bubbles are their objectives on the strategy map. It is pretty powerful stuff. It really is about changing hearts and minds, isn’t it? Notice they didn’t mention performance measures once in there, did they? And talk about engaged leadership, the new CEO on the stage when they showed the promise map said, “You know what’s important to me, this objective down here, getting the right people in this organization. I want to own that objective.” That’s pretty powerful stuff. Then they signed the promise map. They had a great big frame made for it, about 4x6 foot. Everybody signed in the new organization, 200 people, as a commitment going forward, so pretty powerful...

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Analytical Performance Management - InetSoft's buiness intelligence analytics solution for performance management features a powerful computational engine that is capable of integrating data from various sources simultaneously and providing real-time human-centric results and analysis through visualization driven charts, dashboards, and reports...

Analytics for Performance Management - InetSoft offers an easy to deploy, easy to use Web-based analytics application suitable for all performance management tasks. Whether monitoring dashboards, drill-down reporting, or balanced scorecards are needed, point-and-click visual analysis technologies...

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Analyze Management Performance - Here is the thing you learn when you analyze management performance. You have got the top-level echelon there, and they are sitting in a little glasshouse, and they think everything is great, right, that’s a typical classical scenario. And then you have the staff down there at the very bottom, and you know, they are hands-on everyday with that equipment and whatever, and they know the stuff is just falling apart. It’s a complete disconnect. This is a tool to identify the disconnects. The scores can be separated by the different stakeholders. And areas where you have large disconnects, where there are completely different beliefs among the different stakeholders, guess what, you cannot implement any change in that area unless you first get all of these groups to agree that there is a real need to work in that area. That means they all believe the same things, and they all believe that they are equally good or equally bad at that. You can’t move forward because even if the top executives believe there is a change needed, hey, they are going to run into resistance if the bottom of that organization does not believe there is a need for that. So it’s going to be one of those mandates that never gets executed. So, it’s another tool that we look at...

Analyzing Call Rep Performance - Let’s analyze the performances of the call reps, I have a variety of results. This is looking at the percent pledges to all the calls by callers. This side is good. These people are getting 5% and up response rates. These people are getting no response rate, and this is the common group of prospects I’m going after. Let’s look at the bottom end of this. There is a goal here, at least one percent. If I click on the goal line, I’ve now selected the callers and the calls for the under one percent response rate. This is the problem. I may not want to also include zero response rates. These people weren’t getting pledges, but some of them were also getting a lot of refusals. In fact, this group above the red line is getting 5% of their attempts to this top group of donors as refusals. Let’s click that, and I’ve got the people who have done under one percent on the pledges and over 5% on the refusals. Who are they? From the student data I can tell more about these callers. This heat map shows the number of calls made and the caller’s percent pledges. Red is worse. Green is better. I can quickly see that I’ve got some problems with my sophomore grade. The bright red shows them. I’ve got some problems, and some of these majors where those people are doing less well and some of the other majors are doing better. History is more green or lighter color. Hispanic studies, these people do better, these people worse...

Attorney Performance Management Dashboards - I am looking at this attorney performance management dashboard on my PC, but of course, in your environment this could also be in an iPad as well or another sort of device. So let’s move ahead. I get this first report here. Can you tell me what I am looking at? Ron: Yes, this is the main focus of the cluster performance chart. It takes just a couple of minutes to get your head around it. And then once you have done that, it’s quite easy to use. So I will just explain there are few things about the layout, and then we can get into some of the detail. So at the top left hand corner there, Mark, you can see we have got cluster one showing another dropdown. We have got four choices there so we can pick cluster two or cluster three, whichever one you like, and the numbers just automatically change on the little bars. Mark: Very good, yes. So the bars change, and so do all the metrics. Ron: Yes. So that’s just jumping between the different clusters. At the bottom left hand corner we have got some contextual KPIs. They are things that we said we won’t actually measure in terms of metrics you need to improve on, but they provide context for them. The number of partners in the cluster for example is 9. So that just gives them a feel for someone that doesn’t know that team particularly well that there are nine partners in the team. We put in there a figure like lawyer turnover because when we were doing the KPIs we wanted to have some non-financial indicators available...

Balanced Scorecards Are Used by Whom? - Balanced scorecards are widely used by organizations across various sectors and industries. They are typically employed by businesses, non-profit organizations, government agencies, and educational institutions. Here are some examples of entities that use balanced scorecards: Businesses: Private companies of all sizes, including small businesses, medium-sized enterprises, and large corporations, utilize balanced scorecards. They help organizations align their strategies with their performance measures across different dimensions. Non-profit Organizations: Non-profit organizations, such as charities, foundations, and NGOs, often use balanced scorecards to assess their effectiveness in achieving their mission and meeting the needs of their stakeholders. This helps them monitor their performance in areas like fundraising, program delivery, and social impact. Government Agencies: Government entities, at both the national and local levels, may employ balanced scorecards to measure their performance in delivering public services, managing budgets, and achieving policy objectives. This approach enables them to evaluate their efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness...

Balanced Scorecard Creation - Continuing our balanced scorecard creation, the roof of our house contains all that strategic stuff. Strategic results is the lintel of the house. The pillars of the house are the strategic themes. The floors of the houses are the perspectives of the performance dimensions. And incidentally the double arrows here are for when you build a private sector scorecard. Financial measures are the top of the food chain, aren’t they? It's the value of the business to the owners, profitability, revenue cost control and so on. That’s not the case in a public agency or a not for profit. That doesn’t work. The original balanced scorecard model does not work very well for a not for profit or government agency. I mean it doesn’t work for a number of reasons, but the more significant of which is financial is not the top of the food chain. Customer, citizen, war fighter, whatever your stakeholder group here is. So we always put that at the top or recommend putting that at the top. Be careful. We’ve seen some applications that put financial at the bottom for public agency. That’s a big mistake because what you are essentially doing is arguing that all you need is more money right...

Best Performance Management Tools and Techniques - Monitoring dashboards do not need to be static charts. InetSoft's dashboard software uses a visualization-driven approach to enable rapid deployment of self service business dashboards that are highly interactive. This perfomance management system is business user-driven and offers strong analytic and drill-down functions. The key advantages are: Monitor, explore, and analyze and drill down into details Easy to use, modify, and create by business users Leverage user-driven data mashup for maximum self service Suitable for executive dashboards and power-user exploration Combine multiple interactive reports and charts in one screen to replace scores of static ones Dashboards empower business users with an intuitive monitoring and analytic environment resulting in enhanced business performance management, using the information stored within their performance management system. Within an executive dashboard, statistics and data for the company as a whole can be closely monitored by the people who need to know and can take action...

Best Practice for Performance Measurement - Is there a best practice for the timeliness or frequency of performance measurement and when to make a decision that performance is off track and actions need to be developed? Most companies should use monthly timeframes when it comes to the high-level business metrics. But with the operational performance metrics, weekly frequencies are necessary. Such as with marketing or sales metrics, so that you can take more nimble corrective actions if necessary so that the high-level metrics aren’t in trouble by month’s end. Some industries do have a need to look at real-time performance indicators. Hospitals, for instance, do this. But the problem with real-time metrics, you’ve got to be careful not to overreact to a blip in performance. This is a relatively new area for the use of KPIs. IT has had some traditional ones such as the five nines for uptime, server availability, for instance, or are processes running fast or slow. But now that IT is doing things that are customer-facing like powering a company’s online presence and the performance of the Web site is a point of competitive differentiation, that’s where there new performance indicators that need to be tracked...

Best Practices for Selecting KPIs - There a few best practices I can recommend when it comes to selecting key performance indicators, or KPIs. A middle-of-the road approach between a top-down and a bottom-up approach is recommended. Some people talk about a hub-and-spoke approach to performance management, because on the one hand. Some people talk about a hub-and-spoke approach to performance management, because on the one hand, you don’t want to do this in silos. You don’t want each department creating their own metrics which overlap or create inconsistencies with other departments. But on the other end, any enterprise that tries to centralize the management of metrics and all the associated governance will fail. Those BI initiatives collapse under their own weight and bureaucracy and red tape and too many processes. Some kind of hub and spoke environment for performance metrics has its place. Anything that has to be managed and handled and monitored at a corporate level, anything that is mission-critical, anything that goes across the enterprise boundaries, all of this belongs in a hub...