Corporate Dashboards = Demand Generation

Using Dashboards To Create Demand For Software Sales


An airline pilot sits in a cockpit surrounded by an environment that he is intimately familiar with. The ergonomically tuned cockpit has been designed to provide him with precise tools that enable him to do his job in an efficient, timely manner, getting his plane from point A to point B.

So, a corporate dashboard must do the same. It must provide an environment that the user is intimately familiar with, an environment that is precisely matched to requirements and a graphical environment that drives interest in the use of the product.

When I left the software industry 18 months ago, a lot of work was being done in the area of demand generation rather than demand satisfaction. Waiting to be asked to compete with all of the BI vendors when the customer has already put the dots on the paper ready for someone to connect them. And the pen connecting the dots is provided by IT and the picture is normally a solution solving a legacy business problem for the finance team. And the solution was normally nothing more than a report production exercise.

From 1985 to 2005, U.S. corporations spent nearly $5 trillion on computers, enterprise resource systems, giant databases, and local area networks to make business as efficient as possible. Business still has some way to go to reach nirvana.

Peter Drucker said “Executives have become computer-literate. The younger ones, especially, know more about the way the computer works than they know about the mechanics of the automobile or the telephone. But not many executives are information-literate. They know how to get data. But most still have to learn how to use data.

Few executives yet know how to ask: What information do I need to do my job? When do I need it? In what form? And from whom should I be getting it? Fewer still ask: What new tasks can I tackle now that I get all these data? Which old tasks should I abandon? Which tasks should I do differently? Practically no one asks: What information do I owe? To whom? When? In what form?

Phase 1 of the internet provided many promises and dreams of what could be but few companies were able to deliver on those promises. Today the internet is in Phase 2, many of the dreams are now reality. A standard service of many web sites are RSS feeds, point cast was delivering this in the 90s but went the way of pets.com.

Business Intelligence has followed these trends and is now also in phase 2 but few companies have yet to truly take advantage of the promises made in the 90s.

So, how then to draw all this into a huge opportunity for a Business Intelligence company? Here is my concept.

Adoption of a BI standard has to come from the very top. The CEO. Get rid of IT. Get rid of the finance guys. This has to be a business user decision.

Pick a vertical that has historically sat on a googolplex of data. Get a couple of ex vertical specific executives to sit down and provide THE cockpit instruments for that particular vertical. Engage THE designers who can create an Apple esque user environment. Engage THE statistician who can make a few numbers say a thousand words. Engage THE technologists to bolt the cockpit together.

Then, present the cockpit to the Vertical’s CEO community using a presentation that will guarantee a Eureka moment. Not a “solution” to a problem he has, but a new way of doing things.

Creating a demand creation environment will be critical. Partnering with current and new people will be critical. Creating channel and VAR outlets also very important. I do not think that this will be a job for most of the field sales team, rather a separate but integral part of creating a new way to drive corporate adoption of a BI environment so that everyone is taking advantage of the information that currently sits in vast silos within a company.

The following comes from an article in Business 2.0 under the title Hot Trends of 2006.

“This is the next revolution in information technology: a field-level nervous system for every business. Commoditized technologies, wired employees, cheap storage and processing power - Until recently only major delivery services like FedEx and UPS enjoyed the benefits of an automated work chain. Now the entire logistics industry -- truckers and bike messengers, for instance -- is adopting technology en masse. On their most-wanted list: handheld computers, wireless networking gear, cellular devices, and applications that tie it all together”

We find ourselves in the business of the future, the business that our fore fathers could only dream of. A business environment where CEOs are the pilots of hugely complex planes, and all the passengers sit viewing constantly updated maps of their progress as they make their way from point A to point B.