Airsaas: the next-generation CIO dashboard

AirSaas, the next-generation CIO dashboard

In a context where business transformation is accelerating, where innovation is no longer confined to a single department, but is an imperative to the company's competitiveness, digital projects are multiplying, putting the IT department at the center of all attention. We've created the ideal dashboard to help you meet the expectations of General Management, and become the leading business partner for your professions.

Value-driven prtfolio management

The key to a company's success is to prioritize investments that will bring it the most value. The role of the CIO is to set up the governance and indicators needed to make the right decisions and optimize project management.

To achieve this, you need to be able to bring management together around a CIO dashboard presenting the essential data from the various activities, so as to be effective in decision-making.

The main KPIs you need are of 3 kinds:

Planning and monitoring projects
Resource management
Budget management

AirSaas offers three views, each with a different purpose

The List view allows you, for a given state of progress, to review your projects and all their related indicators. What actions should be taken to move these projects to the next phase?

Different views to better manage projects

The Kaban view is dedicated to observing the distribution of projects according to progress status. It can often be used to detect trends (many projects awaiting approval, too many projects running in parallel, etc.) and thus optimize performance management.

The Timeline view enables you to ensure the projects are well-organized over time. Are you overloaded at some point, are you going to deliver on time, are you late...?

Motivate with good communication

A successful project is one that is delivered on time, within budget, but also one that has strong customer buy-in. To achieve this, you need to engage them from the outset and throughout the project build. Good communication is also essential if you are to retain the trust of your General Management. You need to be able to report regularly on project progress, key indicator trends, performance monitoring and team buy-in. After all, people are the number one factor in the success (or failure) of your projects.

To do this, we provide you with two tools.

Gain time and control

Start now with an effective project flash report solution

Book a demo

Automated flash report

Reporting is essential. But it's time-consuming and often overlooked. We give you the option of generating flash reports in just one click. You can export them in PDF or PowerPoint format, so you can keep your stakeholders up to date with the progress of your activities.
The flash report brings together the projects you wish to communicate about. For each project, two slides are generated: one to provide background information, and one containing the key elements of the execution.

Monitoring team engagement

We provide you with an anonymous survey tool to assess stakeholder confidence in your current project. The higher the confidence level, the more likely your project will be a success. On the contrary, if it's low, you need to act fast. There's nothing worse than a completed project that doesn't meet the customer's needs.
With a single click, send the survey to everyone involved in the project. Do this at regular intervals and avoid unpleasant surprises in your project management.

Become a profit center rather than a cost center

Historically, the IT department has always been seen as a cost center. Formerly under the responsibility of the Finance Department, the IT department is now increasingly valued and has its place on company steering committees.

In an effort to improve company performance (innovation and optimization of processes) it is important to make sure:

Your projects contribute to your company's goals, as defined by Top Management
Each project and their gains are defined and measurable

Airsaas' CIO dashboard enables you to track the value generated by IT for the whole company.

All departments had their dashboards - you now have yours

You probably didn't wait for AirSaas to build your own CIO dashboard - and that's good. Following feedback from several dozen CIOs, we developed a performant management dashboard for you.

Structured data

CIO dashboards are often set up on Excel or on visualization tools. AirSaas connects to your project management tools and offers you a more abstract view of your project portfolio. Your data is consolidated around projects, partner solutions, teams involved, etc. to allow you to display and monitor essential indicators for your activity.

Smart indicators to help with your decision-making

The goal here is to provide information to CIOs in order to simplify decision-making for them. For instance, when a project has been requiring decision-making for several weeks, even though it is of strategic importance to a business department, it is important to be kept informed, in order to optimize IT department performance management.

Simple and collaborative by design

It's crucial for you to involve teams in this process. To do this, you need a simple tool that does not require training and allows you to work together according to everyone's access rights. AirSaas was designed as a meeting point between the IT department and business units.

Gain time and control

Start now with an effective project flash report solution

Book a demo

Why do you need to use a dashboard to manage your IT department?

While CIOs used to focus mainly on technical issues, they are becoming increasingly business-oriented: IT is now seen within a company as a major lever for value creation.

But if the IT department wishes to help the company achieve its business goals, it must be optimally managed. And this is where a forward-looking dashboard becomes essential for good IT governance.

Indeed, if an organization wants to evolve, it has to give itself the means to evaluate itself. How else can it know whether it is progressing and achieving its goals?

The prospective dashboard is the tool that enables the IT Department to ensure effective management through short-, medium- and long-term goals. It ensures that goals are achieved without being compromised by operational or organizational issues.

To summarize, a CIO dashboard allows you to:

Ensure optimal management of the IT department
Establish effective internal communication
Identify trends within the company
Follow-up on each of your goals
Analyze differences between the goals set and those achieved
Empower each employee by assigning them goals

How important are the KPIs you choose?

The unfortunate transposition of traditional management systems to CIO dashboards

As Philippe Rosé and Christophe Legrenzi explain in their book “Les tableaux de bord de la DSI” ("CIO Dashboards" in French), for a long time, information systems were evaluated using dashboards and indicators that were ill-suited to analyzing the management of an IT department.

Indeed, the performance indicators used in the industrial world were transposed into dashboards in order to analyze IT department activity. However, these traditional management indicators (including accounting and budgetary control) are not at all suited to the development of an IT maintenance dashboard, which monitors activities which, by their very nature, are cross-functional. Conversely, the indicators used in the industrial world were designed with cost control in mind: they aim to break down each operational department into smaller units, so as to know the cost that each of these units generates, and thus be able to devise methods for reducing these same costs.

As a result, the transposition of these indicators into cio dashboards has been detrimental to the evaluation of IT management activities. It has also had an impact on the way CIOs are perceived in companies and in many articles.

The technological and financial aspects of IT departments were correctly assessed by these performance indicators in the dashboards, but they proved incapable of processing information relating to communication, employees or even the steering of corporate strategy.
The information covered by these metrics concerns the past and the present, but very rarely the future. These dashboards are therefore much closer to a simple activity report than a genuine performance management tool!

Consequently, it's not uncommon for the information provided by the IT department's dashboards not to reflect its activity in its entirety, but to focus primarily on budget control and technology management.

From a cost center dashboard to a profit center dashboard

This way of assessing IT department performance has inevitably led companies to analyze information systems in terms of what they cost. As a result, information systems are managed mainly on the basis of costs, rather than the value they can deliver.

For example, it has been found that a large majority of CIO dashboards incorporate a notion of budget, while only 20% have put in place indicators to assess the value produced by the IT department!
It's easy to understand why IT is perceived as a cost center rather than a value center. And if companies have become accustomed to focusing their dashboards on costs rather than value, this is partly because industrial management systems have been transposed, but also because inventing indicators to measure the value produced by an IT department is complex!
This vision of the Information Systems Department through the prism of costs rather than value is thus predominantly represented in corporate General Management, which inevitably has a major impact on decision-making when it comes to digital transformation.

A CIO dashboard that serves general management

IT department dashboards are essential if top management is to properly pilot the company's digital transformation: indeed, management dashboard indicators are essential for reporting on IT department steering and providing information for optimal governance of the company's human and budgetary resources.

The main applications of the executive dashboard include:

What is the total cost of IT in the company?
Are resources committed to the projects that provide the most value?
To what extent does IT add value to the various business lines and to the company's overall performance?
Where does IT performance stand in relation to the competition?
What future projects should we invest in?

Many of these questions focus on the cost of IT to the company (which on average represents between 1% and 5% of the company's total budget, depending on the sector), but several of them require indicators focused on the value produced by IT.

Yet many of the dashboards submitted to top management are reduced to an analysis of the IT department's budgetary dimension. As a result, many CEOs find themselves faced with the easy solution of judging IT department performance in terms of the ratio of IT budgets to company sales.

The main performance goal is therefore to avoid overspending - even though it's clear that IT department performance cannot be measured simply by its ability to stay within budget.

Worse still, it can be tempting for CEOs to compare the budget spent by their company on its IT systems with the sums invested by competing companies. But it has been shown that not every company defines the sums that should be considered as invested by the IT department on the basis of the same principles! What's more, depending on the sector, digitization needs are not at all the same.

Thus, trying to compare oneself to one's competitors through the budgetary prism is a trap for CIOs.

General Management must therefore encourage CIOs to create balanced dashboard indicators that measure their performance in terms of the value they create in relation to the company's strategic goals. General Management teams who fail to understand the importance of optimizing dashboard indicators in order to influence the company's overall strategy are falling behind their competitors.

How to build relevant IT dashboard indicators?

The main principles of good dashboard indicators

Following a few formal principles when constructing dashboard indicators is essential to control your IT department's management:

All the indicators on your CIO dashboard must be named
All the indicators on your CIO dashboard must be defined, and their definition must be known by everyone
Each indicator on the dashboard must have a goal: without it, it becomes useless
The indicators must take into account the past, the present but also the future
Consider building dashboard KPIs evaluating results (static) but also processes (dynamic)
Build your dashboard indicators so that they can be compared to one another
Indicate how often the dashboard KPIs should be updated (annual/quarterly/monthly/daily...)

Think of dashboard indicators as a reflection of the company’s goals

Although dashboards with performance indicators are already available and designed to apply to any company, the best solution is to choose customization.

Each dashboard used to manage an IT department must be built with the company's goals in mind: these must reflect its strategic ambitions.

Each organization has its own specific way of operating, so a generic IT dashboard will have limited effectiveness. As a result, the most effective dashboards are those that describe how information systems are managed within the context of their company.

An IT dashboard is therefore complex to build, and requires a step back from the company's activities: one of the best ways to achieve a dashboard that is representative of reality is to involve the business departments in its design.

Involve business units in the production of your dashboard KPIs

Often, business units are very little (or not at all) involved in the construction of KPIs and IT dashboards. This is additional proof that the majority of those dashboards are created on a logic centered on IT, even though the direct beneficiaries of the solutions provided will indeed be business units.

Involving business units in the development of dashboards is essential to ensure that the indicators reflect the company's actual situation. Ideally, teams should be formed from business managers (volunteers if possible), accompanied by members of the IT department. In this way, business managers will be able to indicate the areas that bring them the most value, and which they feel are the most relevant to evaluate and monitor on a regular basis, thanks to the dashboard.

To sum it all up, build your dashboard indicators:

By respecting form principles, so that they are truly usable
By adapting them to your business' specific goals
By involving business units in their development

If you follow these principles, you have a good chance of creating a CIO dashboard that really allows you to manage your IT department in an optimal way.

The dashboard that all CIOs expected