Dash for Dashboards?

I’ll be quite honest, I was always very sceptical about dashboards. Sure, they look pretty, have nice colours, summarise information, give you a snapshot of what’s happening and make it easier to explain things briefly. I just didn’t get them. There wasn’t any logical reason about my lack of “getting”. No dashboard had ever jumped out of the screen and bitten me. I had never been mortally embarrassed at a Board Meeting by failure to understand what I was explaining using a dashboard. It is simply that I thought they were an answer to a question that nobody had ever asked, or more pertinently, needed to ask.

However, for the first time in my life (my wife might possibly disagree), I have to admit to a minor error of judgement on this issue.

Dashboards are now, officially, the best thing since sliced bread. They are the answer to all your prayers, or for those with no particular religious affiliation, your hopes and wishes. Dashboards will be the garlic to avenging vampire regulators and are as stunningly effective as hand grenade fishing.

The FCA, in their recent round-up of the first year since the transition to the new rules on Operational Resilience gave some examples of what they have seen as “good practice” when reviewing how firms are handling the new regime. Dashboards leapt out as a shining example of good practice in their comments on governance.

This is very pleasing.

It is very pleasing because, despite my aforementioned scepticism, Aldbury International together with our technology partners, CoBOS Technology have put Dashboards in place with a number of our clients. We have devoted a lot of effort to producing something that looks pretty, is colourful and succinctly summarises information to make it easier to explain what is happening.

The real benefit isn’t so much to the Operational Resilience practitioners we are dealing with on a day-to-day basis with our clients (although they do find the Dashboard helpful), it is when they have to make one of their infrequent appearances in front of the Board.

Funny things Boards. What to you is your entire working life, to them is a fifteen-minute slot in a crowded agenda. Boards don’t just look at (and have to annually sign-off on) Operational Resilience, they have to consider small things like “is the business making money?”, “how do we handle that awkward Employment Tribunal case that has huge reputational issues attaching?”, “what happens if those port facilities we are insuring get hit by a ballistic missile?”, “who is going to be our next Chairman?”. This is a pretty eclectic range of issues and Operational Resilience is just another one they have to consider.

A Dashboard makes life easier. The summary of where you are and more importantly, the direction of travel allows them to ask appropriate questions and challenge where challenge is needed. Nobody enjoys being skewered by a Director, but having a Dashboard gives you, in advance, a good idea of the areas in which you may have to answer those difficult questions.

It is estimated that some 65% of people receive information better visually than any other method. A Dashboard is visual and therefore more likely to be effective than any other means of distilling a large amount of information into a format that can be presented and understood quickly when there is a large amount of information competing for that brain space. As a tool to pass information to a busy Board (who let’s remember, have to take ultimate responsibility for a firm’s Operational Resilience programme), a Dashboard is an invaluable tool. The summary page from Aldbury’s dashboard is shown below.

There are a number of underlying pages which break down the information and can be used to explain how the headline numbers were achieved. All in all, it is a very simple solution to get information across to a busy group of people in as short a time as possible.

Talk to us at Aldbury to discuss how we can put this in place for you and ultimately save everybody a lot of time. If you would like to view a full example of one of our Operational Resilience dashboards, contact us here.