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How much faith do you have in the data that fuel your Board and Exec Reports?
Here we discuss the issue of data quality and transparency, and how leaders can rebuild trust and confidence that reports truly indicate progress against Key Performance Indicators
Organisational reporting is critical to good governance, allowing leaders to make evidence-based decisions on how the organisation is tracking to achieve its goals.
In most organisations, focus areas are developed that reflect areas of the operation where, if priority is given to them and improvements are made, will most effectively allow the achievement of strategic objectives.
When key focus areas have meaningful and measurable KPI’s, leaders can quickly determine whether their teams are operating in line with commitments, and quickly focus attention on areas that may require new strategies to honour commitments to stakeholders.
The challenge many Boards and executive teams have however, is that they can’t trust the data put in front of them. Whether through sixth sense, or inconsistency in the numbers, reporting doesn’t align with what they are seeing and hearing from their teams, and much time is wasted debating tactics rather than determining strategy.
Sometimes this is due to the Key Performance Indicators being subjective, other times, it’s due to manipulation of data prior to it reaching the report.
Regardless, reports resulting from poor quality data lead to frustration, and marginalisation of the impact Boards and executive leaders can have on an organisation’s success.
Most commonly, the mistrust is not a result of being intentionally mislead.
Poor information maturity within an organisation leads to inefficient processes, requiring time consuming and manual interventions to get data accurate and formatted correctly to populate monthly and quarterly reports.
Every organisational unit invests countless hours sourcing, editing, appending and amending data to produce the results that are expected. Time that could otherwise be spent impacting results rather than reporting on them.
The unintended consequence of this manual intervention being that the numbers that end up in reports bare little resemblance to the data that resides in our systems of record. Over time, these systems of record that we’ve invested so much money and resource in implementing start losing their shine, to the point where our teams become frustrated by the effort required to enter data that no longer seems to have any value, or worse, we deem that system is no longer fit for purpose and we spend more money and resource replacing it with another system which will inevitably suffer the same fate.
So, how do we fix this?
We ensure that all our meaningful and measurable KPI’s have trusted data in our systems of record in a format that enables automated reporting.
We’ve determined already that the KPI’s we need to report on are the best measures to indicate progress against our key focus areas aligned to strategic objectives. It would make sense then, that collecting and storing accurate, complete and up to date data would be a priority.
We do this right? Then why do we still get separation between source data and what gets reported?
The answer is often that no-one understands or has modelled the effort that is invested in consolidating multiple sources of data to effectively and concisely report at a level that Boards and executives need to see.
Teams of people are populating spreadsheets, running data queries; manually checking with others and updating numbers to “correct” out of date or poor-quality data. Most commonly with the best intention, but each time eroding faith in the numbers as revenue forecasts are not attained, or sentiment does not marry with NPS.
Who should care about this “industry” associated with monthly, quarterly and annual reporting?
There are two groups that I speak to that are most interested in getting this right. The Boards/Executive, and the people responsible for analytics and insight.
Neither can currently point to transparency in how the numbers end up in reports that are generated. Both are worried about data quality and the impact it has on decisions being made based on the reports, and the risk that these reports don’t reflect reality.
What are we doing about it?
The first step in solving this is to follow the information upstream from each KPI, recording each interaction whether performed manually or automatically by a system.
Having established transparency around how reports are generating, we are now in good position to determine evidence-based levels of trust in the data, introduce initiatives to improve trust and transparency, and better understand the connection between data and our ability to monitor meaningful and measurable KPI’s.
How can we do this?
There are many process tools available that will allow you to model the process from original point of capture through to report publication, but none will allow you to do it as effectively as LINQ.
LINQ is the best tool we’ve seen for the rapid capture of your current state when you want to be able to determine risk associated with failure of any part of the system, and iterate more effective and efficient ways of doing things digitally.
LINQ follows the flow of information through an organisation, showing each human (manual) and machine-based interaction (automated) action, and recording where information is stored. Action duration and frequency is recorded, and people and systems are costed to determine for the first time most likely, the overall cost of operations.
Dashboards and Insight panels will show all People, Systems, Information and Actions contained within the process, and the impact that any risk to any one of these could have on operations.
The ability to Tag elements of the process to indicate Risk, or opportunities for efficiencies (for example) drive dynamic Impact Assessment calculations that will inform business cases for projects that will reduce the burden of producing reports, improve trust and transparency, and mitigate risks associated with critical monitoring and reporting procedures.
The best thing about LINQ though is that it’s FAST!
We can help you model your current and future state digital twins, or we can give you a little bit of training and hand you the reins.
With the best processes and tools to enable your journey to Digital Enablement. Our Adaptive Portfolio Management system will ensure you get the value you expect from change projects. Our best-in-class Australasian built software will help you locate, understand and leverage the data that drives your business.
With the best processes and tools to enable your journey to Digital Enablement. Our Adaptive Portfolio Management system will ensure you get the value you expect from change projects. Our best-in-class Australasian built software will help you locate, understand and leverage the data that drives your business.
We don’t sell, we partner with our clients to identify opportunities to accelerate their Digital Enablement journey. Often that results in one of our world-class solutions adding value, other times it provides our clients with better content to source solutions elsewhere. We’re happy either way.
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