I posted a video recently on LinkedIn bemoaning the lack of care and attention to data governance. Soon after I posted another video about performance reporting getting the same treatment.

In today’s blog, I’ve decided to combine the two.

The first part of the story is that poor data governance is a missed opportunity. You can’t draw clear insights or hope to quantify risk without very good clean data that is interconnected and accessible. Without it, you have the proverbial dog’s breakfast, whether it’s difficulty in managing and monitoring your processes and systems or having confidence in what you report.

The second part of the story is that a lot of performance reporting is a waste of time and misses the mark. Think too many KPIs, wholly underwhelming KRIs, and a stack of board-level performance information that the board simply doesn’t care about.

The end of the story, if you are in that situation, is that Executive Teams and Boards have to make inferences to try and see patterns to guide decision making. It’s an unfair situation.

To re-write your story, know your architects. Know who is designing your systems, data governance and reporting and make sure they understand what is important for your organisation. And that means they need to understand your strategy and the key drivers and levers that the Executive and the Board need to be across to allow them to lead the organisation through this complex world we live in.

I hope your situation is far from this story. If you have read this far, I fear not! Here is an article by Jeff Winter you might find helpful; Dashboard Overload. I like it for its emphasis on simplicity.

And remember, strategy and risk are two sides of the same coin and KPIs and KRIs should be on the same dashboard or in the same reporting pack. Simples!!!