Friday, March 06, 2009

Hunting The Elusive CIO Dashboard

Hunting The Elusive CIO Dashboard -- InformationWeek
"For too many organizations, IT is a black box. Projects and systems are so complex that few CIOs can predict a direct impact on the business, making it hard to win budget and resources even in prosperous times. And when the CIO can't get a clear picture of the real-time data that underlies critical applications, infrastructure, and projects, IT too often ends up reacting to issues after users and customers are having problems.

The answer is a CIO dashboard that gathers key performance indicators, or KPIs, into a central repository that, in a single window, identifies the performance of critical systems and projects in real time. In our discussions with companies of all sizes, such a unified view tops their wish lists. While vendors have been slow to introduce products to meet this demand, we're seeing movement, and it's time for IT to take a look."
This was published around a year ago and highlights a few key focus areas. The article also provides an impact assessment of CIO Dashboards along with a sidebar on how to define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A good read, if you are wondering what a Dashboard is, how it adds value and to whom.