The first thing I thought of as I readthis articleon the “corporate cockpit” or “corporate dashboard” was a real-time strategy game, complete with resources, knobs, meters, zooming controls, etc. These dashboards aggregate and display data that are fed in from different collection points both internal and external to the company, like cash registers, inventory, stock market feeds, etc. This allows management to monitor vital business metrics as they change in real-time or near real-time. The dashboards are usually a site on an intranet where certain authorized managers can log in and see a company’s vital statistics, but sometimes a “war room”-style command post is used instead.
G.E., which began this effort about two years ago, and which like Honeywell has taken a more incremental approach, last month put the capstone on its digital cockpit project. Dubbed the corporate cockpit, it charts the top-level performance of G.E.’s 11 primary business units, with numbers culled from each unit’s individual cockpit. Only 45 of the top G.E. executives are authorized to see it.
The front page includes nine different categories ? including headcount, sales, orders and pricing, among others ? and the numbers that correspond to each unit. There are also tabs at the top of the page that display a page of nine graphs showing, for instance, NBC’s ratings, the number of delinquent credit card accounts within G.E.’s card services division, and the price of benzene, a critical commodity for the plastics division.
Many of these statistics can be zoomed in on so that the manager can check out the underlying data that give the reasons behind the numbers. The dashboards also allow a manager to do some data mining in order to investigate underlying trends and causes.
