At Summersault, we’ve got a strong appreciation for the value of making good decisions based on good data. In building high tech tools or proposing solutions to our clients` technical problems, it can be tempting to make a choice based on a single example case or a speculation about how things work: “I got lots of website traffic on the day I blogged about monkeys, so I will convert my entire blog to be just about monkeys!” Sometimes these choices can even be the right ones, but sometimes the absence of good data can mean uninformed or even disastrous decisions (“was it really the monkey blog entry, or was that also just the day your site was featured on another website?”). We know that over time we can make even better choices based on measurable trends and performance indicators.
For many organizations, the challenge of making good decisions based on good data starts with finding out how to get access to the data in a convenient, consolidated way in the first place. Sure, you can get last quarter’s figures on where your sales leads or website visitors came from, but if you have to ask someone to poke around in a database or read confusing reports to make it happen, are you really going to look at those numbers as often as you should? Probably not; we can be lazy creatures, and if we have to work too hard to get information, we often won’t bother, even when it would be useful. Good decision-making tools are the ones that let you dig deep when you need to, but otherwise focus on giving you the “executive summary” view in the form of a dashboard you can take in at a glance.
This is why some of us at Summersault have been yearning for our own highly visible office “dashboard” for a while now. Ever since seeing Panic, Inc.’s Panic Status Board in 2010 and various derivations of the same concept, we’ve been plotting to make our own a reality.
I’m happy to announce that the flagship version of the Summersault Status Board (a.k.a. the “panic board”) is now up and running:
