Organizational dashboards have become a popular tool for monitoring performance. They are being used by a wide variety of organizations. Here are some examples:
Healthcare
The Dashboard Spy presents some examples of performance measures that hospitals are tracking on their dashboards. He shows dashboards being used by Methodist Medical Center in Illinois, Dean Health System in Wisconsin, and Scripps Health system in California.
Nonprofit
BlueAvocado.org, in an article by Jeanne Bell, shows how nonprofit organizations are using dashboards for managing financial performance, program implementation, human resources, Board of Directors accountability, fundraising, compliance and risk management.
Government
The new governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, has implemented a dashboard to track the State’s performance in the area of education. His administration solicited input from constituent interest groups throughout the State and then came up with five categories: 1) Student Outcomes; 2) School Accountability; 3) Culture of Learning; 4) Value for Money; and 5) Post-secondary Education.
The performance measures on the dashboard in each of these types of organizations are important because they get stakeholder attention and drive action priorities. However, it is the process of creating a dashboard that is the most powerful evaluation and learning experience for an organization. As I wrote in my book, Developing a Learning Culture in Nonprofit Organizations, the value of developing a dashboard (or scorecard) is in “…selecting outcomes to measure, identifying indicators of progress toward those outcomes, and observing effects of changes that are made to maximize organizational results. The [dashboard] is just the locus of energy for a process of evaluation and organizational learning that involves critical decisions about what is important to measure and what should be done about the results.” The content and look of the dashboard influence its usefulness, but it is the process of developing the dashboard that contributes to organizational learning.
