How to Set Up CIO Dashboards?

To manage, steer and successfully govern an entity or activity, Dashboards seem to be the ideal tools, especially in IT departments. However, they are often costly to set up and maintain over time, and do not always deliver the expected service.

So how can we set up the CIO dashboard(s) so that they are truly useful and effective? Here are some answers.

What’s a Dashboard for?

Its primary function is to provide – on the basis of a number of performance KPIs – a tool for tracking and steering an entity, giving an overall view of the business.

A Dashboard is not an end in itself. For it to be effective, it must be a forward-looking tool that enables you not to “steer by sight”, but rather to anticipate foreseeable developments and help you make decisions with a view to continuous improvement. In this respect, it is positioned as a genuine Information System (IS) governance tool, which will make it possible to :

• Steer the organization by dynamically identifying trends and developments
• Measure achievement of objectives (forecast/actual) and analyze causes and effects of variances
• Be informed and inform, communicating with all the organization’s stakeholders
• Develop areas for progress and improvement, by empowering all players on the basis of clear expectations.

For the CIO, the Dashboard also represents a double opportunity:

• Better communication, by serving as a medium for exchanges with all our stakeholders: users, businesses, CFOs, CEOs, and of course our Teams.
• Even more importantly, it shifts the perspective to reposition the Information Systems Department around a strategic vision; the dashboard is not confined to reporting on the management of the IT domain or the “simple” control of its full costs. It highlights the mechanisms that create value for the organization, and better explains the role and contribution of the IS to the company’s current and future performance.

The challenge is ambitious, but it’s worth the effort. The dashboard thus helps ensure that the IT department is not reduced to a cost pool, and allows for the measurement of its performance level, the quality of its services, and its “true” added value (purpose), rather than focusing on the resources consumed (means).

That being said, setting up Dashboards requires taking into account 3 parameters that are essential to the success of the approach:

• Clearly define the purpose of the Dashboard: what are the expectations and objectives In this respect, we must never lose sight of the fact that the Dashboard must be built around a demonstration; through it, we are ” telling a story “, giving an understanding of an intention.
• Adapt the system to the size of the organization and its maturity on the subject
• Adopt a pragmatic approach: undoubtedly, it’s better to start simply, and effectively distribute a^1st Dashboard, even a modest one, which will get the ball rolling, rather than launching an exhaustive gas factory that’s doomed to failure from the outset, as maintaining it will be mission impossible.

How do you set up an IT Dashboard?

A Dashboard is a reflection of an organization, its culture and its challenges, and must therefore be adapted accordingly. As a general rule, it takes 3 months to complete a Projects implementation. There are 6 main stages :

• The diagnosis: Take the time to develop it and present it to the CIO—if he or she is not steering the project—as well as to his or her teams and senior management.
• The goal: to be clear about the objective of Reporting: It is necessary to establish short-, medium-, and long-term strategic directions, drawing on “traditional” governance tools that define the IT department’s purpose and the vision for IT within the company: business plan, master plan, etc. If there is a need to clarify the IT department’s strategic positioning and scope of authority, one can even ask senior management directly: “ what do you see as our added value? What are the most important performance evaluation criteria for you? “.
• Raising awareness: don’t forget to drive change! Stakeholders, and in particular IT managers and staff, need to understand and embrace the virtues of Dashboards, and this can be achieved through training.
• Layout and finalization: if necessary, divide into several versions with priority/secondary KPIs to avoid the subject “dragging on”.
• Confirmation with top management that the result meets expectations.
• The presentation: launch the new Dashboards by presenting the overall approach to the team’s managers and staff, to make it part of a real management culture and give them a sense of responsibility.

Focus on diagnostics: taking stock to assess the starting point

Before embarking on the “IT Dashboard” project, we recommend you start by taking stock of what already exists in your organization:

• On the IT side, collect dashobards where they exist, contracts, SLAs and commitment tracking, activity reports, reporting, user satisfaction surveys, etc.
• Beyond management, gather together business dashboards likely to include IT indicators, and operational dashboards by business and/or subsidiary, which may contain other valuable KPIs.

On the basis of this material, we can assess which areas are more or less covered. A simple count of the number of KPIs available for each major area of the IT function can already be very enlightening as to the main orientation or maturity of steering: economic steering and budgets, IT asset management, purchasing and contract management, HR management, supplier management, studies and projects, operations, user services, risks and security, governance…

To extend this assessment, we can carry out a macro-analysis of the organization’s “Dashboard culture”, by evaluating these questions * :

• Is the purpose of the dashboards clear and shared by all stakeholders (including senior management, business units, and the IT department)?
• Are they aligned with the company’s performance priorities?
• Do we have enough resources to develop them and bring them to life?
• Is there a cell or individuals officially assigned to work on it?
• Do Dashboards come out regularly enough to meet your needs?
• Is their coverage rate sufficient?
• Are the IT and business teams aware of their importance, and are they on board? Is their level of participation satisfactory?
• Is the training and management culture sufficient?

Finally, this analysis will be completed by an evaluation of each KPI; if there are too many of them, we can concentrate on those that add the most value, particularly for General Management:

• Is the indicator explicit and understandable?
• Does it set a performance target?
• Is the method of calculation clear, the source reliable and the representation relevant?
• Have we identified the person responsible for this indicator and the people to whom it is addressed?
• Is the frequency with which it is collected adequate to enable decisions to be made and improvement actions to be launched?
• Is the cost of obtaining it in line with the benefits?

This diagnostic work can be a bit of a painstaking task, but rather than plunging headlong into a subject that can quickly turn out to be sprawling, it has the merit of clearing the way and better defining the scope of the approach.

How should the CIO dashboard be presented?

There is no magic formula or single model that univocally covers all the needs of all organizations. On the contrary, the art of good management lies in the ability to develop KPIs that are relevant to a given company and context. Quite often, not just one, but several tables are required .

However, certain generic principles can be applied to them.

First and foremost: to appeal to the right target audiences, especially senior management, a good IT Dashboard must reconcile two dimensions and their associated KPIs:

• Strategic management. It is based on the medium- or long-term target, often derived from the master plan, and on the path to reach it through objectives and key success factors. It focuses more naturally on Tracking projects and flagship actions, validated at the highest level.
• Operational management. It ensures that objectives will be achieved and not hampered by operational difficulties; it therefore steers the organization’s operating activities in the shorter term.

What a Dashboard shouldn’t be

KPI’s that an effective Dashboard should contain

A succession of transparent figures presented without context (strategy, organization, people) and without objectives, focused on the past and present and ignoring the future, thus preventing decision-making, improvement and progress Static reporting, focused on results to the detriment of processes (dynamics) Reflection of the IT function’s internal activities only, to the detriment of the context and the link with the company’s activities as a whole (external performance is targeted as much or even more than internal performance) A compilation of disparate KPIs preventing any exploitation, comparison or consolidation.

Strategic (IT department strategy or even corporate strategy) AND operational (business unit activities and performance) Financial (relating to both Resources and value generated) Human resources (hard and soft skills) Organizational (clarification of internal and external roles and responsibilities) Related to IT or information assets: Hardware infrastructure, network, workstations, etc. Applications, monitoring, antivirus software, software, software packages Information Digital data Documents tracking the various activities of the IT function: Studies Projects Operations User support Administration

Which KPIs for which Dashboards?

Within the IT department, multiple dashboards can coexist. Their common goal, in addition to promoting continuous improvement, should be to convey a specific purpose. Here are a few examples:

Studies and Projects table

There is a wealth of information on this topic. However, it is difficult to create a portfolio management dashboard that is sufficiently unifying for all stakeholders—business units and the IT department.

5 main KPIs will be monitored:

• quality (which will include compliance with a Statement of Work (SOW), detailed tracking of change requests and their impact on all other dimensions monitored)
• the schedule
• Budgets
• the future costs of the solution (whether in terms of hardware, software, support, help desk, etc.), with this evaluation to be carried out for all the businesses that will benefit from the solution.)
• future benefits generated by the solution. This last point – on which it is recommended to have a “standardized” nomenclature of gains (sales, cost reduction, margin increase, reduction in lead times, improvement in quality, image, etc.) – is essential, as it enables the contribution of IT to the company’s performance to be valued.

For all these aspects, it will be key to constantly monitor the initial estimate, the consumption to date, the re-evaluation at the end of the Projects, and to measure and explain any discrepancies.

To be more concrete, Project portfolio reporting can include KPIs such as :

• overall portfolio status for a global view (projects not started, in progress, completed)
• the % of Statement of Work (SOW) lots/deliverables, to monitor the progress of Projects
• initial, committed and final Budgets, and variance. To monitor the budget management of Projects, including all resources (internal and external personnel, hardware, software, training, etc.).
• For each Project, start, end, estimated completion dates, variance
• Initial, committed, estimated final workloads, variance
• The allocation of resources between business units and the IT department (whether internal or external). In this regard, there is a tendency to underestimate or poorly track personnel workloads on the business unit side.

Beforehand, it’s essential to place the project in context, by means of a fact sheet: challenges, applicant, sponsor, expected benefits.

The maintenance chart

Maintenance reports provide valuable information for the development of KPIs that can be used to reduce maintenance costs or optimize intervention times.

In addition to a summary Dashboard, which compiles the number, nature, frequency, duration and cost of maintenance interventions, it’s a good idea to have a breakdown for each application.

Particular attention should be paid to monitoring and analyzing changes over time in maintenance rates and workloads, which must remain at acceptable levels. Two periods are particularly sensitive in this respect: Go-live and the end-of-life of an application, when obsolescence is on the increase.

The operating table

Its aim is to “control” an organization’s various IT sites.

Traditionally, we monitor KPIs such as the number of connections and disconnections to servers, response time, availability, CPU load, number of failures, page errors, firewall attacks, etc.

It might be interesting to add 2 visions:

• that of the user, to measure the level of criticality and the impact of any malfunctions on the organization,
• for the company: what impact will any disruption in system availability have on the business (in terms of lost or dissatisfied customers due to service interruption, lost production, etc.)?

The safety panel

The subject is vast and sensitive. Without going into detail, let’s simply point out that a good security Dashboard should maintain a balance between strategic KPI’s (security policy implementation, information protection, compliance, corporate image and reputation) and operational KPI’s such as vulnerabilities, theft, incidents, attacks and crime, or information protection.

The assistance table

User support is often the IT department’s^first point of contact with the rest of the company, and a decline in quality—whether real or perceived—can be critical both in terms of user performance (with tangible impacts on productivity or even revenue) and in terms of how the IT department is perceived and viewed.

The dashboard can be used for a variety of purposes: increasing end-user satisfaction, aligning IT services with business needs, managing service levels and business relationships, optimizing and industrializing…

Typical KPIs include: number of calls received, pick-up rate and number of rings, average call and resolution time,^1st level resolution and escalation rates, number of calls/user/month or per application, average cost per^1st and^2nd level call, etc. These KPIs are calibrated according to your objectives. So many KPIs to calibrate according to the objectives you’ve set yourself.

Digital transformation chart

The rise of digital technology and digital transformation is opening up new avenues for the IT department, which can go beyond its traditional roles and expand its scope of operations and sphere of influence. A dedicated Dashboard can help anticipate and steer this digital transformation.

In their book Pilotage du SI et de la Digital transformation, Christophe Legrenzi and Philippe Rosé propose several KPIs:

• Strategy: Measurement of information capital, or digital sensitivity via the number of management meetings where digital issues are on the agenda.
• Sectors: Digital customer experience measurement, Sales generated via digital channels or digital products and services, Time to market
• Ecosystem: number of startups among suppliers, number of hackathons
• Skills: share of digital skills, level of appropriation of a corporate social network, rate of use of digital tools in relation to total Headcount
• Technology: number of APIs or applications in the cloud

However, these KPI’s remain more difficult to Deployment, both in terms of data collection and in terms of their development, which is necessarily cross-functional.

How to use and benefit from Dashboards?

As we have seen, a good Dashboard is just as much a management tool in the service of corporate performance as it is a powerful, factual vector of communication, the basis for dialogue between the Information Systems Department and its contacts: Business Units, Financial Management (DAF) and General Management.

Between these two dimensions, in order to transform the KPIs collected into actions to be launched, it is necessary to succeed in what Christophe Legrenzi and Philippe Rosé* call ” management dialogue “, and involve all players.

This cannot be decreed. Of course, the Dashboard must be of high quality, and in particular, the KPI’s must go beyond a presentation of the current or historical situation, to present concrete, communicable objectives on which to position oneself and make decisions. This will enable us to go beyond the simple presentation of KPIs, which would reduce the dashboard to basic reporting with no real added value.

More broadly, we need to succeed in establishing and perpetuating a genuine management, steering and performance culture within the company. The context in which Dashboards are used and the organization’s level of maturity are therefore essential parameters.

Is this a sign that the goal has been achieved? It is worth noting that dashboards (IT-related, but not limited to IT) are regularly referenced within the company, in all communications (whether with management or with the team), systematically consulted for decision-making—consistently across departments—and serve as the primary source for the IT department’s communications with its stakeholders.

6 best practices to make Dashboards even more effective

1. Integrate qualitative KPIs

Are the project objectives clear? Is the methodology being followed? Is the working atmosphere positive? Is collaboration between team members optimal, and is the relationship with the client good? Quali” or “soft” KPIs have their place in dashboards, particularly for optimizing Projects Tracking. Considered to be “inexpensive”, they provide a complementary and often accurate viewpoint that adds real value to performance management.

How to proceed?

• For example, one can conduct—among the various stakeholders in the IT department (the “client” who commissioned the project, Project manager, and team)—to assess the situation, before the project begins and then at regular intervals, and then compare the results to ensure that their perspectives are aligned.
• Another approach is to ask each player his or her level of confidence in the key points of the project: compliance with the schedule, budget and Statement of Work (SOW).
• Satisfaction surveys (user, team, etc.) can also be added to this Dashboard.

2. Limit the number of KPIs: 20 max. per Dashboard

Dashboards must remain readable and operational. Aiming for exhaustive reporting would be pointless; instead, you need to retain the most meaningful KPI’s (for the target you wish to address as a priority) and the most relevant for decision-making.

3. Automate data collection as far as possible

A Dashboard is only as good as its maintenance over time, and some KPIs may require frequent updating. To save time and energy, we recommend automating as far as possible the transmission of information needed for updating. Wherever possible, you can opt for dashboards that are updated in real time (as is the case, for example, with the financial dashboards offered by the Abraxio platform, which are constantly updated with all available data).

4. Identify a manager

Appointing a member of the team officially in charge of Dashboard coordination is one way of giving the subject the place it deserves in the organization!

5. As far as possible, generalize KPIs with a 4-column matrix.

This simple matrix will enable each KPI to contribute effectively and dynamically to continuous improvement: it will systematically contain the objective, the actual, the deviation and the associated remarks.

6. Consider the “Dashboard” subject as a project in its own right, whose effectiveness can (and must) be evaluated.

After a while, it’s a good idea to measure the ROI – Return on Investment – of your Dashboards by carrying out an audit. You can evaluate :

• Their cost: what workloads are involved in defining and developing the system, and, on a recurring basis, in running it (data collection, processing and consolidation, reporting and communication, analysis and identification of corrective measures)?
• Their benefits: how many malfunctions identified, decisions made, improvements quantified?

CIO dashboards are therefore essential tools for management, provided they are well-designed and integrated into an appropriate governance culture (to which they will also contribute). Tailored to the IT department’s mission and scope of operations, they contribute not only to its performance in serving the organization but also to its positioning by highlighting the value created by IT and even by digital technology as a whole.

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*Note: For further information on this topic, we recommend reading the comprehensive book by Christophe Legrenzi and Philippe Rosé , *IT department steering and digital transformation: CIO dashboards* (Dunod), which provides a wide range of KPIs for addressing this subject.