Conversations from the Mirror42 Team

KPI Dashboard Messages allow you now to post comments in “Twitter style.” Messages are a great way to add meaning to your Dashboards: Post improvement actions, comment on outcomes, and share your ideas on how to improve company performance.

What else can you expect this summer? Extended APIs and integrations with:

How does one come to a set of KPIs for their own specific company?

Setting KPIs is not easy and it is not always wise to simply copy what others have done and rely on best-practices.

In general, KPIs are related to the corporate strategy of a company. What is the goal of the company for this year? Is it to break-even, to grow marketshare?, to deliver new products to the market, to be the most customer friendly company in the market?

A company can be broken down in core processes and supporting processes. The core processes make the difference with the competition, it is what makes your company unique. The supporting processes are often not unique. This differs per industry. In the finance and telco industry, the IT processes are core processes and allow them to compete, think about better financial analysis applications or faster networks, however in most industries IT is not a core process and simply supporting.

For your supporting processes (HR, Finance, IT) it is often ok to standardize on best-practices. However for your core processes you should perhaps start with best-practices but think about your KPIs as an extension of your corporate strategy. What are your goals? How are you going to measure and quantify those goals. And if your goal is to make a big profit, then do not make the mistake to call profit an indicator. financial outcomes are not often indicators, but results. The indicators are “more sales meetings, bigger quotations, more leads, more partnerships, more projects. These indicators lead eventually to more profit. A KPI is a Key Performance Indicators, not a Key Performance Outcome.

You can use KPI Library to find best practices for your processes and perhaps your industry. Use this as a starting point, a source of inspiration to start your internal discussion with some examples. Dont expect the KPI Library to be your destination, but the start of your journey.

Last week we have introduced the ability to browse KPIs by business framework. A business framework is a standardized set of processes for a certain business area. Examples of such frameworks are:

• ITIL (Information Technology)
• SCOR (Supply Chain)
• Cobit (Information Technology)
• Prince2 (Project Portfolio)
• Value Reference Model (Value Chain)

Take a look at the new search and select options: http://kpilibrary.com/library

Also, the ability to select KPIs from these frameworks is available in our premium products: KPI Dashboard, KPI Benchmark and KPI Project.

Since the official release of KPI Dashboard last December we have added several new features and improvements based on feedback from customers.

• Notes on measurements
  Add textual notes to measurements to clarify scores. The notes are for example visible in graphs in the dashboards.

• KPI Dashboard available on iPhone (KPIScorecard)
  Follow trends and scores of KPIs on your iPhone with KPIScorecard.

• Notify users in case of new dashboard content
  Send notification emails to users when new content in dashboards is available .

• Video tutorials
  Get up to speed with embedded video tutorials covering various features such as “creating indicators”, “adding measurements”, and “defining dashboards”.

• Breakdown relations
  Create relationships between breakdowns for improved navigation, for example “regions” divided into “countries”.

• Breakdown dashboard templates
  Create one single dashboard template and apply it to breakdowns so users see the same dashboard but with different content. For example, a “region” dashboard for all regional managers that shows content based on the region that the manager is responsible for.

• Assume as user
  As an administrator take a look at how other users have access to KPI Dashboard, for example to verify access to dashboards.