Cockpit Rooms for Strategic Business Intelligence

An overriding obligation in both private, public and not-for-profit sectors is that they have a sensible plan of some sort and that it is monitored carefully - to determine both direction and priorities and to provide a reference point to determine whether goals are being achieved. Traditional strategic plans typically contain a hierarchy of statements. At the upper level these statements are intended to create a high level sense of direction and purpose. They are often referred to as ‘mission’, ‘vision’, values, goals, objectives, etc. A problem with these statements is that, if they are not designed to be the basis for realistic ends achievement and performance monitoring, they can have little more than rhetorical value. It is vital, therefore, to express performance indicators and targets.

Having the organization’s Top Management turn its primary attention to the strategic results it wishes to achieve will assist it to attend to those matters on which only it can give leadership to the organization. A critical role is to be aware of the helicopter view that is on the radar screen and challenge the organization’s thinking and its mental maps of the world in which it operates. The latter means that there is a profound difference between the contents and format of the management information as it is provided to the Top opposed to the reports intended for operational management and their analysts. Whereas the former are abstract and take a lot of external ‘macro’ factors in account, operational management and analysts need more detailed information. It is therefore an illusion that both user groups can work with the same solutions for their intended purposes.

EFM Software has taken this insight into account and provides special strategic dashboards intended for the Top Management’s Cockpit Rooms (sometimes even referred to as ‘War rooms’). These are real “decision” rooms enabling teams to visualize all key information at a glance to support them to take the right decisions. It is intended to make executives more productive by improving communication between team members and by focusing them on the strategic issues. Bizzscore offers the possibility to use Interactive strategy maps in such sessions. By clicking on strategic objectives and key performance indicators in the strategy map, trends, charts and textual information unfolds. Related topics are shown in side screens, including macro economic indicators. Comments and actions that are entered during the meeting are automatically sent by e-mail to all those involved and integrated in Microsoft Outlook agenda’s. In other screens, strategic initiatives, their status and corresponding strategic objectives are shown.

Numerous companies are using the Cockpit Room concept successfully as a highly effective management tool to improve the decision quality and productivity of executive teams. This is very important; in a highly dynamic and open global economy, the quality of management decisions and the productivity of interdisciplinary teams are more than ever set to turn into critical success factors for organizations in all sectors.