CEO Dashboard: A single-pane view into business performance
“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality,” according to organizational consultant Warren Bennis. As a leader, you need to have a vision that you can bring to life for your employees, customers, partners, and investors. That’s why we created the CEO Dashboard.
For a CEO, bringing a vision to life involves understanding performance across different areas of the business, identifying pain points or roadblocks, and optimizing the strengths that deliver business value.
Traditionally, CEOs have ingested these data points in periodic reports or meetings—sometimes with days, weeks, or months between updates. Information might be delivered in disparate formats, and important events might go unrecognized. The lack of consistent, real-time information can make it difficult to balance strategic priorities with daily demands.
In short, this isn’t a formula for a data-driven, growing organization.
The need for broad visibility
At ServiceNow, we’re growing fast. As a result, our internal environment is constantly shifting. And, like every company, we operate in a dynamic world that presents challenges such as inflation, pandemics, and supply chain delays.
Our C-suite recognized the shortcomings of the old way of leading business operations without a holistic, big-picture view of organizational performance. Siloed data sources stymied attempts to keep tabs on operations, make data-driven decisions, and capitalize on growth opportunities.
Our CEO and his team needed a consolidated dashboard.
Leveling up for levelheadedness
We built the CEO Dashboard on the Now Platform using ServiceNow Performance Analytics, Process Optimization, and UI Builder (Next Experience UI). The dashboard gives the C-suite a centralized glimpse, viewable on desktop or mobile, into how the organization is doing at multiple levels.
The CEO Dashboard provides the executive leadership team with a three-pane view of operations and the ability to switch perspectives as needed:
- Enterprise level is the control tower of the business operating model. Almost all our operations run across multiple systems and functions, but here they’re condensed into a single view with real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect business performance in crucial areas.
- Functional level provides leaders with insights into specific business units. They can better gauge how we’re doing in terms of speed, productivity, and risk mitigation, and then begin to optimize.
- Workflow level lets leaders assess each of our more than 900 workflows, displaying efficiencies and inefficiencies through detailed process maps. Leaders get insights to understand business processes and tools to improve performance.
KPIs within each level provide a quick pulse check to assess operational performance against business goals. The KPIs include metrics for a specific time period, change from a previous period, metrics tracked against a predefined target, and trends of historical values.
Leaders also get predictions of future metrics to help them better anticipate obstacles.
CEO Dashboard benefits
Some of the features of the CEO Dashboard might remind you of a typical business intelligence (BI) system. Although it can be used alongside a BI system, the CEO Dashboard offers distinct advantages. Any time leaders log in, from any device, they can benefit from:
- Real-time insights: Since the CEO Dashboard is built on the Now Platform and co-located with data, no data movement or transformation is required, resulting in significant cost savings.
- Insights to action: After viewing real-time insights, the leadership team can jump directly to transactional data and source systems to take corrective action without logging in to another system.
- Rich context and business process control: Behind each insight is the data and related workflow. Leaders can gain visibility into end-to-end processes across the business to pinpoint areas of opportunity.
- Process mining: AI-powered analysis and process optimization capabilities help ensure processes reflect the actual flow of work (versus a designed flow) and deliver real value.
The CEO Dashboard is available in the ServiceNow Store and is free for ServiceNow customers. Find out more about the dashboard in our white paper, How we use the CEO Dashboard.