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GCN Home > 07/19/04 issue

Tools for data-driven management

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Execs count on dashboards to make better decisions, faster

James Taylor, the Commerce Department’s deputy chief financial officer, didn’t know his boss was unhappy until he read it in a magazine article.

Then-deputy secretary Sam Bodman, a veteran executive of several large corporations, bemoaned the lack of financial tools at his government post.

“He was quoted as saying he had never before worked in a place where he could not get monthly financial information,” Taylor said. “We call that an incentive where I come from.”

Taylor’s team turned to a tool called an executive dashboard, now being used by a growing number of agencies. The dashboard in effect opened a window into various financial systems so that Bodman and other executives could quickly see the department’s financial status, bureau by bureau. Commerce chose a dashboard from SAS Institute Inc. of Cary, N.C., one of several dashboard vendors.

A dashboard isn’t limited to financial data but can track any metric related to departmental performance.

“Dashboards help you manage performance by seeing common metrics,” said Gabrielle Boko, marketing vice president for Lanner Group Inc. of Houston, another dashboard vendor.

Although some dashboards can drill down to detailed data, their chief value is in visual summaries—pie charts, bar graphs or traffic lights—understandable at a glance.

Pretty face

But some executive dashboards are little more than eye candy, said Frank Buytendijk, research vice president for business intelligence and corporate performance management at IT research firm Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn.

If managers can’t act on the visual information, the software ultimately is of little value, Buytendijk said.

Wise government users design their executive dashboards to pinpoint bottlenecks and potential trouble spots, he said.

The issue for Commerce was noninteroperable systems. Even after financial reporting was consolidated under the Commerce Administrative Management System, officials still could not quickly produce a set of departmentwide numbers because bureaus were using five versions of the finance system. Three bureaus still ran their own independent finance systems with functions not offered by CAMS.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Executive Center, FISMA, Management, New Products / Technology



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