“A list of 90 Key Performance Indicators is a contradiction in terms.” insists Allan Wille, long-time Dashboard Spy contributor and President/CEO of Serence, the desktop dashboard company. He went on to explain that today’s business users are hard pressed to monitor what really matters (business progress) in a world where the most precious commodity seems to be attention. How can you even monitor 90 things, much less consider them each “key”?

Allan has just finished a nice write up that features sneak peeks at the desktops of different business users across an enterprise. As Allan explains about this fascinating study:

Here is another little article that I thought might make a cool discussion – before and after shots of user’s desktops around the idea of what they really should be paying attention to.

Here is Allan’s excellent article for you Dashboard Spy readers:

Are you focused on your priorities?

Allan Wille, Serence Inc.,
August 8, 2008

You have regular meetings to discuss performance. Every quarter, there’s a bigger meeting where the organization looks at its successes and failures and reevaluates its priorities.

How is progess measured between meetings? Maybe there’s a spreadsheet that you update when you have time or there are complex reports from an enterprise resource planning system. Do you look at them? Does it matter?

If the answer is yes, you belong to a select group of people that can overcome daily distrations to stay focused on the big picture. It’s too bad you spend so much time digging and analysing. In the time that remains you’re an informed and effective contributer to organizational goals.

But if you’re like the rest of us with competing demands that make focusing on KPIs difficult or impossible, this article is for you.

Obvious Priorities

Here is a snap shot of NORAD. Even if you don’t know what NORAD does, you can make an educated guess based on the image. This is because NORAD’s priorities, the USA, the former USSR, and the space between the two, are right in front of everyone. If something changes it would be difficult to miss.

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