PHOENIX — Because even important internal e-mail can become spam to the jaded eye, a dashboard on the computer screen is providing a new way to share key data–such as how the bonus is coming along–at Arizona Central Credit Union.
The 185 or so employees at the $441 million credit union in Phoenix are among the first dozen or so Passageways clients to deploy new corporate performance dashboards from the pioneer in intranet portals for the credit union space.
Arizona Central had been using a Passageways intranet portal for several months already, sending employees there on a daily basis for such things as employee directories, expense reporting and the credit union's products and services manual. Now it's added dashboards that display five key numbers the CU is using to calculate performance bonuses: asset growth, accounts per household, member survey scores, expense ratio and net profit.
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"The dashboards are in a banner on the intranet that highlights each of these for about four seconds and then moves on to the next one," said Bill Kostow, Arizona Central's director of strategic projects.
"It's very easy for e-mail to become spam even from internal sources," Kostow said. "Putting them on the portal allows you to put those numbers out there in an easy way for people to search for it and find it as they need it, without having the interruption of it coming at them when they're not looking for it."
Digital dashboards aim to provide quick, simplified access to data from many disparate sources, including the core processing system, lending solutions, accounting packages, reporting systems and member surveys.
"By combining the power of portal platform, most notably the ability to adjust the views of data for various roles in the organization, with the simplicity of dashboards, organizations are able to keep track of where they stand on virtually any measure, easily and from one location," said Christopher Beltran, a Passageways co-founder and its vice president for product development.
By constantly displaying performance measures in a place that employees visit regularly during the day, such dashboards "bring large datasets to life visually in an easy-to-process way," Beltran said. "That enables the key decision makers to steer their organizations toward short-term and long-term goals."
A typical deployment usually includes five to 20 dashboards and costs $3,000 to $10,000, according to Passageways, founded in 2002 by a pair of Purdue University students as a CUSO of Purdue Employees Federal Credit Union in West Lafayette, Ind.
There are more than 30 different types of gauges and five types of graphs available to display historical data and trends, and alerts can be set up to let users know when milestones are met, said Manan Relia, professional services manager at Passageways.
"Our dashboard solution provides the organization the flexibility to input the data manually, upload files with data our system can analyze, or even read the data from spreadsheets," Relia said.
While they can be configured for different roles in the organization, Arizona Central has chosen to show the same dataset to all employees.
"Everyone from our board to our management team to our teller line is looking at the same dashboard," Kostow said. "We update it monthly as our financials come in and everyone sees it. Our portal gets about 16,000 visits a month. We really feel that putting the dashboard there raises organizational awareness."
There's also an unexpected benefit to this method of information sharing, said Paroon Chadha, also a Passageways vice president and co-founder.
"It's uncanny how often this transparency will spark new ideas and change behaviors," he said. –[email protected]
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