Design of Multi-perspective Multi-Organization KPI dashboards

Many organizations are now pursuing implementation of dashboards that track key performance indicators. The challenge is how do you take this concept across multiple organizations and into a higher level goal that serves a cross cutting concern, both from a short term perspective as well as medium and long term perspectives. For instance, how does an environmental ministry see where it needs to act today, tomorrow and  how it is doing with respect to its goal of promoting sustainable development.

Dashboard organization

I feel that the first thing is to break it up into operational, strategic and policy dashboards. I will explain these one by one in the following sections.

Strategic dashboards

At a high level, organizations have goals and a set of strategies. Strategies to me, in an organizational context are, just as the original English word suggests, ways to achieve a certain goal. The reason I thought about mentioning this, is because I have seen many executives who use strategies and goals interchangeably.

A strategic dashboard, then, should provide at the top level, the goal/ or a list of goals that the organization is trying to meet (to provide a context) supported by the set of actual strategies that will support the overall goal. To ensure that we can measure our progress towards our overall goal, we should express our strategy in quantitative terms. We can then list how the overall quantitative strategy can be achieved by improvements in supporting measures across departments and organizations. This of course may need some detailed models for demand and supply side equations to ensure we are going to be effective in achieving our strategy.

Operational dashboards

The next level is of course operational. Operational measures are easy to describe and measure, as they tend to track stuff in real time or last 24 hours. They draw our attention to what is important right now.
In a multi-organization setup, what is operational for each organization may be different. A utility may be looking at its smart meter infrastructure feeds, as the operational dashboard measures. A higher level organization, such as a regulatory board, may be looking at customer satisfaction as the operational data.
Within the context of each operational dashboard, the only thing that is needed is ensuring that whatever it is we are measuring can be related to other measures. Also important is to ensure that the key performance indicators defined are not at going to work at cross-purposes with each other. If these are working at cross purposes, care should be taken to define a third measure that prompts the executive to figure out what is actually going on.

Policy dashboards

Now that we have covered the operational and strategic dashboards, we are still missing one key perspective. That is the policy. Policy as the English word describes, is a guideline or a procedure or a process that must be adhered to in carrying out the operations and implementing the strategy. This ensures that strategy implementation does not violate the basic tenets that the organization believes in.

However, there is another way by which I have seen policy alluded to. And that is policy as a container for the actual goals itself. For example, the policy dashboard may list all the policy objectives that the organization has adopted for itself.

Again, in a multi-organization setup, the policies (both goals and guidelines), may be in conflict within the organization, or across organizations. This needs to be addressed as an aggregate dashboard will highlight this fact.

All of these together to me determine the different perspectives an organization needs to take into account while designing decision support dashboards.