Eating Your Own Dog Food
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!
July 22nd, 2010 at 3:25 am
Hi please can you tell me more about Wobs. where can i read more information about.. and understand more more about. tx
September 2nd, 2010 at 2:04 am
Short answer:
We created the term WOBs. It stands for “Windowed Objects.” WOBs are the specialized things you add to your dashboards in our software.
Long answer:
To explain WOBs it helps to know how our dashboards works as well as everyone else’s. The way you create dashboards with most dashboard software on the market is to add dashboard objects (charts, maps, gauges) to a grid. We’re a little different. Instead of a grid-based layout, we use a freeform canvas like PowerPoint. This allows you to create dashboards that look pretty fantastic.
Another difference between us and most other dashboard software is that others use Flash to draw the dashboards. Flash is a browser plugin that doesn’t work for many devices like mobile phones, screen readers for blind people, and devices like the iPad. Our dashboards are created using 100% open standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Finally, and most importantly, our dashboards can contain so much more than just graphs and gauges. You can also add things from all over our software like reports, comment dialogs, and gantt charts. You can see a list of all metrics that are currently red and drill down for more info. You can reply to a comment right on the dashboard. They’re live and they’re interactive.
So, WOBs are the complication of everything I’ve talked about. They’re interactive slices of our software, made from normal HTML, that can be dragged around and resized on our dashboard canvas.