Ofstead’s Chief Sir Michael Wilshaw is reported this morning as wanting to provide “at a glance” dashboards to allow for monitoring of the performance of schools.
The dashboard metaphor is one that has developed over the past dozen years or so, in the corporate ambition of providing “one version of the truth” to aid management decision making. I reckon, whilst the aim is laudable, the metaphor is duff. First of all, compare the average car dashboard (above) with the average management reporting dashboard. Sometimes I think that charging people who design systems by pixel (and with a minimum font size restriction) is the only way to stop this madness.
But the other challenge in the metaphor is that most dashboards convey a very small amount of real-time data (speed, revs, maybe temperature, and (mostly for legal reasons) total mileage), and mostly communicate by exception. You know, when that red light comes on that you’ve never seen before that means something’s about to cost you dearly…
Reporting by exception is often cited as good practice in certain management situations (project reporting is one example), but I’ve very rarely seen it happen in practice. Strikes me this is for two reasons: firstly, that by exception is often left too late; and secondly because management reporting, far from being objective truth, is in fact a very complex abstraction and as such plays a political as much as logical function. That in turn leads to management reporting often being a “sea of green” – lots of good news – which is necessary to give balance to a broader story about progress and success.
So what is needed if it’s not a metaphorical dashboard? There will always be inherent danger in simplifying the complex to a limited set of numbers – maybe we need ways to think about how we editorialise complexity into easier to understand, but prose rather than numeric, format. Something like a parent newsletter, perhaps? But that probably doesn’t sound nearly scientific or technical enough to meet with current fashions.
mmitII 