Reports are boring. Can we all agree on this?
Sure, reports may contain interesting information. But there’s something deeply stultifying about the actual presentation of the data in commercial reporting packages. With apologies to my friends at business intelligence vendors, it’s almost as though the designers had set out to create bad “before” examples for an Ed Tufte book.
But an even bigger issue is that automatically-generated reports don’t tell a story. They don’t separate the important from the trivial—the signal from the noise. That requires humans. (continued below the image)
Allscripts is on a transformational journey, implementing KCS and swarming practices in what they appropriately call their Many Minds Program. Their leadership knows how important it is to provide feedback about their progress, celebrating the good and showing opportunities to get better. They knew that generic reporting wasn’t going to do that for them.
Infographics are hot, in print publications and especially social media. So Allscripts’s leadership borrowed good visual presentation ideas from infographics to come up with the image you see above. In this widely disseminated—and frequently updated—image, Allscripts shows
- Positive business results, such as decreasing backlog and increasing first day resolution (FDR)
- Social proof that others are using the Many Minds practices—increasing adoption, users, and large numbers of swarms
- Who the superstars are on a team-by-team basis (warning: make sure that focusing on activities doesn’t compromise outcomes)
- The connection between activities and business outcomes, as swarms lead to high case resolution
- A reminder of the key ideas—simple visual representations of the swarming process along with the core activities: search, swarm, attach, create.
So, the content is fantastic. But the reason people will take the time to find out how good the content is, is that the presentation is fun and engaging. (Did you solve the word puzzle? Put your answer in the comments below!)
Now, this obviously requires some time from a graphics professional. But, in the big scheme of things, probably not all that much time, and look at what you get as a return on your investment! To me, this is far cooler—and has a far greater impact—than a generic program poster.
If you took a little time to tell the world your team’s story in infographic form, what would that infographic look like?
(HT J. Wade Yarbrough and Selbe Bartlett of Allscripts. Wade presented this as part of a Many Minds update at TSW Las Vegas this year, and was gracious enough to let us share it in the blog.)
