Almost all the businesses that I have met in the last 10 years are using a calendar view for external and internal reporting.
When the month ends, the financial controllers and business analysts get to work. They crunch the numbers and produce the monthly spreadsheets and powerpoints. Ten years ago this was done for financials only and the whole process took 3 to 4 weeks. Today this is done much faster and with more business data living a digital life the scope expanded from financials to sales, marketing, production, project management, IT management and many other business area’s.

Business Intelligence has failed in the last 20 years.

There, I said it.
And here is why.

1. Most businesses are still doing "monthly reporting".
2. Most businesses are despite having purchased all the BI tools in the world still using excel and powerpoint to create their reports.
3. Spreadsheets and Presentations are extremely labor intensive and known to be full of human errors.
4. Most BI Licences are never used or hardly implemented.

In performance management we often talk about "lagging" and "leading" indicators. But what do they mean exactly? Lagging indicators are typically "output" oriented, easy to measure but hard to improve or influence while leading indicators are typically input oriented, hard to measure and easy to influence.

In the Netherlands we have 20-25 free days a year. In the summer the Dutch typically take 10-15 days off and leave their rainy country to relax on a sunny coasts in Spain, France, Italy or jump on a plane to explore nature in Asia, South America, USA or Canada.

Some of us are control freaks. They can not let go, they can not unwind, not even on holiday. They keep asking themselves: “what if something happens with the business while I am gone?”

About 2 years ago I decided that it should be possible to run the company from a sandy beach anywhere on the globe using only an iPhone. As a results, we only use business applications in the cloud to run our business. Gmail & Google apps for email and calendaring, Google Adwords for Marketing Salesforce for CRM, Zendesk for support, Freshbooks for invoicing and project management, TribeHR for human resources, Goto Meeting, Skype & Yammer for communication and off course KPI Library to consolidate all the data and turn in into meaningful Business Analytics.

The best decision ever, our business is 100% “holiday ready”. I am really looking forward to the sunny coasts of Italy in august, knowing that each morning I can check out our KPI scorecards, receive daily updates and know that my co-workers do the same so we are not dropping the ball in the summer.

Here is a vision statement to help sell your performance management initiative to your executives:
“Within 12 months, every employee will be able to check their email, calendar and their personal top 10 KPIs at the breakfast table using their smartphone or tablet.”