Disregard Dashboards at Your Peril

Today's CFOs have a cheap, cost-effective and creative opportunity to productively re-brand themselves. They should take it.

In much the same way that software spreadsheets utterly transformed both the process and practice of financial management, a new genre of networked software will transform business performance management. Desktop digital dashboards that display key performance indicators (KPIs) are slowly emerging as powerful tools for building enterprise accountability and transparency and shaping priorities.

Executives and line managers alike now have the network-enabled ability to design, define and refine the KPIs they select to define business performance. Whatever metrics managers think matter -- customer satisfaction, inventory levels, work in process, call center median wait time, for example -- can be measured and monitored. Peers, staff and superiors can access the same information and come away with the same, or different, insights. That's what accountability and transparency can, and should, mean.

CFOs need to take a leadership role in energetically developing and deploying dashboards enterprisewide. Why? Because decoupling and divorcing "financial management" from "business performance management" invariably leads to higher costs and lower efficiency for both. By contrast, the ability to better align and integrate financial management and business performance improves the efficiency and effectiveness of both. That's value. Technology has radically reduced the cost and challenge of this integration and alignment.

Who better to lead such a project than the CFO? Who should better understand the need for and importance of tools that give people the ability to see how their KPIs reinforce or conflict with financial priorities? Just as important, what better way for CFOs to rethink how their teams can best support the KPIs that drive profitability, growth and customer service?

The emergence of digital dashboards offers a new platform and opportunity for CFOs to redefine their value proposition for the enterprise. The notion that CFOs can be champions for business performance -- not just financial performance -- is an important one.

While CFOs don't need to become "CKPIOs" (chief key performance indicator officers), they would be foolish to treat this opportunity as irrelevant to their core mission. To the contrary: One way or another, smart C-level executives are going to be looking for every chance they can to integrate business performance with finance.

CFOs can be organizationally subordinate to this challenge, or they can drive it. Savvy CFOs who grasp that they must be business leaders more than financial overseers will treat these technologies as a transformational gift.

Frankly, the dashboard dynamic may well prove more important to business futures than the installation of ERP systems as business and financial platforms. ERP forces businesses to customize their financial and performance reporting processes to the software, but digital dashboards permit greater agility, flexibility and responsiveness. Smart managers and entrepreneurial executives will embrace them as essential tools for influence and innovation. So should CFOs.

These technologies create a chance for business performance partnerships that can happily marry financial oversight with new value creation. CFOs should invest accordingly.