I'm going to ask you to try and transport yourself back in time.
Transport yourself to a recent Quarterly or Monthly business review meeting.
Maybe you're actually there right now. (Don't worry, I won't tell anyone what you're doing.)
You are past the small talk, the struggles with the teleconference line and the video and projection issues and have made it to the heart of the meeting where you are reviewing the 96 slide PowerPoint presentation littered with data points about how the business is performing.
These slides probably involved many painful hours (or days) of data extraction into Excel, where the data was then manipulated for various reasons (mostly because it didn't tell the story exactly as someone in charge wanted), and then converted to visualizations where someone spent way too much time deciding which color palette looked best. *
You are now on slide 37 and the beautifully-styled bar chart (using a monochromatic blue) representing our backlog is being shared. It appears the backlog has been steadily increasing over the last few months but this month it's jumped by 15% and has gotten the attention of the senior leadership in the room. Liz, the executive sponsor in the meeting, turns to Tom, who owns the service desk, and asks, "Tom, what is going on here?".
Tom may or may not have had access to this information prior to the meeting, but whether he did or didn't, the typical response is, "I'm not 100% sure, I'll get back to you".
The conversation about this particular opportunity to improve stops and you move on to slide 38.
Imagine the same meeting being run using live dashboards...
When the question is posed to Tom, he can drill directly into the data point representing the uptick in backlog for this month and show Liz information regarding influencing factors like assignment groups whose backlogs have consistently increased in age or the categories that are contributing most to the increased volumes.
No delays, no "I'll get back to you". The opportunity is identified and the path to resolution is identified right then and there. What's more, Tom is able to show immediate action - whether or not he was blindsided in the meeting.
There is so much dialogue these days about the need for digital transformation, about the need to inject digital capabilities into the organization's processes to improve business and operational efficiency and uncover new opportunities, yet most organizations are overlooking a small change that would be a big step on that journey.
A simple shift away from running your meetings with static data in PowerPoint slides to running your meetings with live dashboards is a small change that most organizations could make immediately.
Using live dashboards rather than static extracted data, any time a question arose about a given data point or outlier, the group would have the ability to interact with the data to ask follow up questions, continue the dialogue, and potentially take immediate action (an advantage of an embedded analytics solution).
This small change has the immediate impact of a more streamlined decision making process but it also continues to support the shift to a more data driven culture and it will increase the overall accountability of all stakeholders aligned to a given business process.
Okay, bring yourself back to right now.
Is your next Quarterly or Monthly business review meeting going to be a stream of charts in PowerPoint slides?
Could your organization take this small but transformative step and eliminate the "I'll get back to yous" from your meetings?
Not ready to answer right now? Ok fine, you can get back to me.
But I hope this is the last time.
*If this part of the story sounds way too familiar you should read this blog right after you finish here: Opportunity is what happens when you are busy preparing data
