Performance Dashboard Design

MacLennan indicates that a large number of strategies fail to achieve their specified objectives due to problems during implementation. Obstacles to effective strategy execution include difficulty with change management, strategy that is vague and poor, insufficient guidelines or models to guide the execution, having a strategy that conflicts with the current power structure, poor or inadequate information sharing within the organisation, unclear communication of responsibility and accountability, lack of ownership of the strategy among key employees, and poor understanding of the role of the organisation's structure and design in the execution process. Hrebiniak elaborates that, in the current information age, new organisational capabilities are necessary to maintain or gain competitive advantage. Rasmussen suggests that the probability of achieving strategic goals increases exponentially as an organisation increases its ability to measure and act to improve its performance.

"Strong leaders need more than just the force of their personality and experience to focus an organisation. They need an information system that helps them clearly and concisely communicate key strategies and goals to all employees on a personal basis every day. The system should focus workers on tasks and activities that best advance the organisation's strategies and goals".

Researchers agree that information (quality, accessibility, and relevance) is a key contributor to the successful implementation of strategy. The field of BI emerged in the 1990s, when organisations started to test ways of giving business users direct and timely access to integrated information. Managers also started to seek ways to manage strategy and optimise performance; hence the emergence of the discipline of enterprise performance management (EPM). A major problem at that time was the availability of data and databases, and the lack of good extraction, transformation, and loading tools to extract data automatically from one system to another. These challenges were only addressed in the 21st century, enabling the use of information to be exploited.