We have been writing pretty decent software for over 6 years now and we’ve always wanted to use it. After all, everyone says that you should “eat your own dog food”, a phrase that Wikipedia says came about because “Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood” challenging him to increase internal usage of the company’s product”.

But the fact is, it didn’t work for us. As a small business, we could measure both our strategic and tactical success by looking at about 10 KPIs. You don’t need an enterprise class performance management application to do that.

But then in August, we introduced Spider Connect™ and Scoreboard® with absolutely incredible WOBs™ (web Windowed Objects) and everything changed.

All of a sudden we could create a scorecard reflection of our monthly P&L quickly and easily, export the P&L to Excel, read it and map the data fields in the spreadsheet and import the data into Scoreboard®.

THEN, in Scoreboard® we could create absolutely incredible Dashboards for visual analysis of the data. We could put those Dashboards into Briefing Books and export them to slide presentations that we could share via email and discuss at management meetings.

Overnight, our software became a genuinely critical part of assessing our performance and actioning improvement.

Wow does that make an incredible difference in the way I see our market. We are still a very small business and we still have clients who are the largest Fortune 100 companies in the world as well as the US Army which is the largest organization in the world. But if WE find our software indispensable, ANY organization needs Scoreboard® and Spider Connect™!

We not only imported our P&L but we could easily create new KPIs from the P&L data that give us critical insight into our goal attainment. For instance, we want to see our licensing and hosting revenue increase by at least 2.5% month to month, but ideally 5% month to month so that we achieve a 70% increase over 12 months.

Here’s what that looks like in Scoreboard!

I work on dashboards all day every day, so it’s easy for me to lose track of just how cool they are. When Scott sent me these examples, I was floored!

This week, a major Fortune 500 company requested we add the capability to separate out sections of our pie charts to highlight important information. Here is an example with 4 sections highlighted this way. We still need to add some graphic polish, but already this looks like a pretty cool feature!