Globe Bank (a fictitious name to protect the anonymity of one of the world’s leading banks) implemented a management dashboard solution to provide better performance information to their senior executives. After investing a lot of money and time in the dashboard solution the bank realised it had made many of the common mistakes, which rendered their dashboards meaningless and led to a complete redesign of their management dashboards.

After consulting with the senior leaders about the kind of information they wanted and a review of the data the bank had available, dashboards were designed and automated schedules were created so that these dashboards were automatically emailed to the key decision-makers in the bank. On a monthly basis these dashboards were delivered by email notification to the senior leaders. At the beginning, managers enthusiastically opened them and reviewed the content for new insights. However, over time the enthusiasm reduced. After about six months people felt that the dashboards were not really delivering the information they needed and they felt it was difficult to find the relevant insights among the large amounts of information provided.

The fact that managers used the dashboard less became very clear when the automated scheduling came to an end after 12 months, which meant that these dashboards were no longer emailed to the key decision makers. The telling fact was that most of them didn’t even notice and nobody was asking for the dashboards to be delivered again. This indicated a serious problem with the dashboards and triggered a review of the issues.