The Dashboard Spy

What good is all the hard work you put into envisioning, implementing and rolling out a business system if it’s not adopted by the intended user community? Or, let’s look at a more subtle problem - how do you even know whether users are actually adopting the new system? The folks at salesforce.com have put out a great paper on a framework to study and manage user adoption. It’s called Adoption Dashboards Data Sheet (Metrics) and it’s a brief but valuable read.

First, let’s take a look at what a salesforce.com sales metrics dashboard looks like:

The whole premise of the approach is to use the graphic-based nature of the dashboard to stimulate interest and, hence, adoption of the system as a whole.

Here are the metrics put forth by salesforce.com as useful when studying user adoption. Scroll down to view the KPIs.

The 3 basics elements are:

• Usage (who’s in and what are they doing?)
• Data Quality (can we trust what we see?)
• Business Performance (are we succeeding?)

Here are some excerpts from the preceeding metrics categories.

The first category is User Adoption - basically you want to know if the users are logging in and using the application.

Data quality speaks to whether the users are entering the correct and sufficient details into the system.

And finally business performance and the system usage is studied.

Tags: Salesforce.com dashboards, business system usage adoption measurement and management, user adoption dashboard.