We recently held an IMF Connect with several member companies based on “Performance Management Reporting.” You can download the full IMF Report on our website in the Published Reports section. This was a great discussion focusing on some very pertinent issues including:

-          A balanced scorecard approach

-          Consolidating your metrics and KPIs to a select few

-          Dashboard organization and drill-down capabilities

-          Erasing silos around the business and technology

-          Establishing common metrics for different organizations tasked with different objectives

-          Customer survey response rates and asking “the right question”

Here is a brief excerpt where one member company talks about what they see in the consumer banking industry in terms of dealing with large metric indexes:

“We haven’t had a lot of luck with that but I’d love to hear other opinions on this. Rolling things up into this big index turns out to be useless because no one can understand it. I followed index 97.43 and our goal is to get down to 97.22, that sort of thing. Instead you could say we want to have an organizational goal that 95% of our things happen on time. So everybody has their own individual SLA’s but you better make 95% within your SLA or within that scorecard as you break it down. You could also say something like you must attain a customer rating of XYZ and find that common metric. At the end of the day, if you’re looking at what the customer wants, they only care about when we’re late or we make a mistake. To that point you want to find how many errors we make, how many times we’re late. You generally look at it that way and then you roll it down by individual. Now that is the customer satisfaction side and you can do the same thing for sales. However, since a lot of people share IT or operations on the productivity side, you can say we want to have a certain cost per customer or account and find something to normalize it across that. Of course this is all much harder than it sounds but finding that common metric is always hard.

What we are experiencing right now in the consumer bank is that having people get rid of their individualities is very difficult. For instance, trying to compare ATMs next to mortgage next to a branch is not easy. On the other hand, if you can have people agree on those key customer metrics, like how many times are we late, make mistakes, or do something that costs us money, then you can track those things. Just in our mortgage business alone there are five sub-lines of business and a few thousand people. That’s not just across the business, that’s in one LOB. It is tough getting people to sign onto these four particular things that we need to run our business. However, unless you do that, you’re going to end up building it from the bottom-up and having a million metrics that don’t roll up anything. So you end up with two things. You either end up with an index that means nothing or you end up with a 100 page report because all you are doing is up pages and then shoving that up to senior management. The balanced scorecard fails if you do any one of those thing…”