Business Intelligence - Scorecards and Dashboards

Understanding the true performance of your business and its progress against the corporate strategy is not an easy task. Enterprise performance allows you to track the performance of your company or division against KPI or metrics - dashboards and scorecards can help.

A scorecard is a concept for measuring whether the activities of a company are meeting its objectives in terms of vision and strategy.

A dashboard being a set of indicators about the state of a process, piece of equipment, or business metric such as cash on hand or YTD sales at a specific point in time.

This and subsequent posts will looks into the best way to view your business for making the right decisions.

A scorecard could include some of the following metrics:

• (Marketing) Customer registration times
• (Marketing) Visitor WEB site bounce rates
• (Sales) Percentage of sales on first contact
• (Operations) Stock deliveries
• (Marketing) Frequency of potential customer contact
• (HR) Review ratings
• (Sales) Call centre sales

The author of this diagram is the Balanced Scorecard Institute

A dashboard can include some of the following metrics:

• Number of inbound calls in queue
• (Sales) Sales growth
• (Operations) Stock on hand
• (Marketing) WEB site enquiries
• (Sales) Sales by state this month
• (IT) Average Call Resolution Time
• (HR) Staff Turnover
  

This dashboard is available online and seen here.

Using a combination of both dashboards and scorecards will provide a holistic picture of your business. This set of tools has the potential to highlight a number of facets of your business that you do not know!

Dashboards are often a better choice for metrics that operate in minutes or hours.

Scorecards tend to be better used with metrics that are usually reviewed over a longer time period ie weeks or months.

Note: Aleron has designed and implemented visualisation scorecards and dashboards for a number of large and medium companies.

Google to acquire Motorola ?

I read an interesting post on the activities of Google in the mobile phone space.

Do you know about Android, open access, 700MHz and a gPhone?



Do you know that Google acquired Jaiku - something that Nokia was rumoured to be after. Google acquired the popular “activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones.” Google has made a number of acquisitions in the mobile and VoIP space.


Android is an Open Handset Alliance Project. The Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies, is developing Android: the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. To help developers get started developing new applications, we're offering an early look at the Android Software Development Kit.

Archart made the comment:

Here’s the thesis: If Google is prepared to go as far as Android, why not go the next step and produce its own handsets? Not just a single ‘gPhone’ but entire portfolios of Android-enabled devices.

Nokia is a company that produces a range of handsets, a handset OS, a rich set of mobile applications and services. Why not Google ? Nokia has spent $10 billion trying to compete with Google in search, email, file sharing, advertising and mapping (e.g. Enpocket, Intellisync, Avvenu and NAVTEQ).

Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz discuss the availability of the SDK, that it will be open source in the future, and demo some applications.

Techcrunch have a great posted predicting what the next set of companies Google will acquire in 2008. Another interesting post about Google strategy is WEB 3.0 and Google.