Prepping and collating company-wide data once a month or once a quarter, is an arduous task for the finance department in any size organisation, no matter its size. In the gaps between these reports, the company is effectively running blind without actionable insights that could support agile, data-driven decision-making.

Data can add significant business value and is essential for helping leaders to align their teams behind the organisation’s strategic direction. While you may have set KPIs or OKRs in a strategy session at the beginning of the year, it is critical to know if you are achieving them or if they are still relevant in our fast-changing and dynamic world.

Goals, measured in terms of OKRs, KPIs and other metrics are there to set the direction of your organisation, and to align the business and its people behind the company-wide vision, mission and objectives. Measuring goals helps prompt questions such as:

• Are you achieving the goal?
• If not, how far off are you from reaching a specific goal?
• If you are achieving a goal, could you achieve more?
• Should you stop working on a particular area and focus on another one?
• How is your achieving (or not) your goals affecting your colleagues?

Many businesses have yet to reach the stage where they can glance at a dashboard for real-time insight into the progress towards their organisation’s strategic destination. However, this capability is not difficult to obtain in the digital age. What is missing for most organisations is a set of tools and methods to continually measure and communicate progress in a controlled but transparent manner.

The data generally exists, so get going

The good news is that most of the information you neede to measure and communicate progress of your organisation’s goals, is already available and accessible in your systems in the form of data like financial metrics, sales pipelines or customer satisfaction. Automating the collection, collating and visualising data in a business-friendly manner is a great first step.

A good data department will be able to get the information you need and present it in near-real time and in a way that your business can gain insight into achievements, trends or to drive business innovation.

Spend your time on analysis, not wrangling spreadsheets

At +OneX, we run multiple business applications including SAP and Microsoft Dynamics to manage our business. We use Power BI dashboards to give our management team a consolidated, real-time window into what’s going on in the business at any time. The dashboards are automatically refreshed, pulling data from different sources and presenting it in an insightful way, which means our executives can spend their time on strategic analysis rather than updating Excel.

As a trusted data partner, we are there to help organisations get to the insights they need to support their strategic goals. Please get in touch to find out how we can provide your organisation with data-driven insights that drive business value.

Simon Harvey

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