If you ever look at a snowflake dangling from the window at your local Macy\u2019s or Bloomingdales, realize that this snowflake is only a piece of marketing, there to draw your eye, but not an accurate representation of reality.\u00a0 You see, most marketing snowflakes have either five or eight sides to them.\u00a0 Nobody seems to know how or why this happened, but I suppose some marketer out there thinks that it is more aesthetically pleasing to have a five or eight sided snowflake.<\/p>\n
The reality of the snowflake is that they almost always have six sides.\u00a0 Sometimes they may have three or twelve, but those are relatively less common to the six sided variety.\u00a0 The reason for the multiples of three is simple, snow is made up of water, or H2O molecules, and chemically have so many bonds to offer to other H2O molecules.\u00a0 The end result is that water molecules can create snowflake structures with three, six or twelve sides.<\/p>\n
The beauty of the snowflake is a wonderful thing.\u00a0 Certainly it does draw our eye and our attention.\u00a0 Certainly the thought of beautiful fresh white snow brings to mind a white Christmas, skiing through fresh power, kids and snow angels, or whatever else you have in mind.\u00a0 But at the core, it is still just a marketing figment of our imagination, inaccurately portrayed.<\/p>\n
Manager and executive dashboards are quite the same.\u00a0 Often, we have planned and conceived for months or years about how to best capture the attention of our executives and bring them thoughtful HR data.\u00a0 We\u2019ve given them tools and pretty graphs, and indeed, these dashboards carry the flare and flash that can draw anyone\u2019s attention with a state of coolness and color.\u00a0 But at the end of the day, the dashboard is just the dashboard.\u00a0 VP\u2019s of HR and other executives often don\u2019t really look at the dashboards we\u2019ve worked so hard on.\u00a0 They might glance at a particularly high turnover rate, but rather than digging through the detail themselves, they might instead pick up the phone and call they nearest HR director with an inquiry about what\u2019s going on.\u00a0 At the end of the day, they still rely on the same old mechanisms for information.\u00a0 They want us to create reports, and have meetings.<\/p>\n
The cause of all of this is particularly simple.\u00a0 Executives have no use for data.\u00a0 The best representation of an HR analytic, whether it be a trended graph, or some sort of drill-through crafty piece of eye candy, is still just data.\u00a0 What executives want is information, and our dashboards still don\u2019t interpret data for them.\u00a0 That\u2019s why they still need the rest of us, our reports, and the face time in meetings.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think I\u2019m being critical of dashboards \u2013 in fact I rather love them.\u00a0 But we have to understand the gap if they are to get better.\u00a0 Dashboards can give execs a glance at the health of their organization, but they don\u2019t provide understanding and diagnosis.\u00a0 We need to be able to provide information, not data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you ever look at a snowflake dangling from the window at your local Macy\u2019s or Bloomingdales, realize that this snowflake is only a piece of marketing, there to draw your eye, but not an accurate representation of reality.\u00a0 You…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27,40,47,8,2,7],"tags":[448,87,89,437,90,88],"class_list":["post-1279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-metrics","category-enterprise-solutions","category-governance","category-strategies","category-hr-technology","category-portal","tag-communications","tag-dashboards","tag-data","tag-engagement","tag-information","tag-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1279"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1281,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279\/revisions\/1281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}