Metrics and Dashboards in Selling Company Initiatives to Executives
How do executives determine whether company initiatives are effective or not? Executives don’t have the time to regularly comb through lengthy reports. They need important information to be delivered to them in as concise of fashion as possible. This is the role that a dashboard plays. Through a well-designed dashboard, executives can get all of the business analytics data they need.
Building an Executive Dashboard
An executive dashboard must be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. The statistics displayed should be relevant to the organization’s current goals, displaying both metrics that are over-performing and under-performing. These metrics should be displayed in a timely fashion and should allow executives to drill down to further information that is relevant to them.
At-a-glance, the executive dashboard must give a broad spectrum overview of company initiatives, including everything that needs to be improved upon or modified.
Choosing the Metrics of an Organization
Which metrics should an executive be shown? After all, a company is likely tracking hundreds of them — which are most important? Begin with your organization’s most important metrics, such as its net profits. From there, pare down to the metrics that are underlying that, such as sales and expenses. These underlying metrics are what influences your net profits.
If an organization has current and specific initiatives, such as increasing returning customers or improving upon new sales, these metrics should additionally be tracked. This gives the executive actionable information regarding the company-wide initiatives that are currently on-going, so they can determine whether the company is moving in the correct direction or not.
Use Data Visualization and Analytics
Few people, even experienced company executives, can glean any information from charts upon charts of numbers. Data visualization makes it easier to analyze large volumes of seemingly complex data all at once. Through data visualization, patterns more easily emerge. Pie charts, for instance, can be compared quite quickly to each other to identify current trends.
The right data analytics dashboard will give you a variety of ways to display information. The more varied the information displayed on the executive dashboard, the easier it will be to compare different metrics and identify changes as they occur. There are many software suites out there built for visualizing complex sets of data.
A modern organization is only as good as its data. There is no way for a business to succeed today without tracking its metrics. Moreover, the metrics on a company dashboard give an executive the information they need to make powerful, well-informed decisions for their company. For more information about the role that information plays in business today, contact the experts at Starr & Associates.