3 Reasons Why Federal Leaders Need Executive Analytics First

With every Federal fiscal year, many new and existing agency leaders ask themselves: How can I maximize my impact and affect meaningful change?

Upon taking office, agency leaders have limited time and resources to determine and implement their management priorities. With political appointees only staying in their roles for an average of 2.5 years, leaders must hit the ground running to leave their mark on the organization. When newly appointed or even career civil servants have questions about agency operations and performance, these leaders cannot wait for staff to gather relevant data, conduct analyses, and return with answers. In addition to waiting days, weeks or even months, answers are often incomplete, inaccurate or different depending upon which staff members are asked and which datasets are analyzed.

With hundreds, if not thousands, of disparate systems, federal agencies often struggle to access, understand, and act on data that can improve operational performance and mission attainment. Legacy reporting using manual tables and spreadsheets delays effective decision-making on operational priorities, and creates confusion and a lack of focus within the workforce. 

Agency administrators, directors and their deputies need trusted performance data from across programs and mission-support functions to make operational improvements, and determine what lines of business need to be transformed before issuing directives and allocating resources.

Despite the overwhelming amount of data, some innovative Chief Data Officers are successfully enabling their agency’s senior leadership with real-time, accurate insights. Data-driven agencies are providing their leadership with an interactive set of dashboards that provide fast, easy access to agency insights.

This solution, Executive Insights 360 powered by Tableau, enables leaders with a single lens into agency operations and performance. Executives benefit from a highly consumable view of current, accurate data across the enterprise with the ability to easily drill down for deeper insights.

Here are three reasons why agency leaders need Executive Insights 360 before embarking on any agency or digital transformation.

1. Identify what needs to be improved before allocating resources

Tracking agency KPIs across programs and enterprise business areas such as Human Capital, IT, Procurement, and Finance, can be nearly impossible without an analytics platform that delivers insights from various, often disconnected, information systems.

With Executive Insights 360, executives can see agency metrics and operational trends from a centralized location to determine which programs, offices, and mission-support functions are meeting performance goals. Amid rising taxpayer expectations and growing demand for a more performance-driven and accountable government, Executive Insights 360 enables consistent metrics and an understanding of performance. It uncovers issues and points to opportunities for improvement.

Executive Insights 360 can be an agency or mission leader’s compass for driving effective change and making lasting impacts on the organization, its mission and constituents.

2. Ensure internal alignment and transparency to focus staff efforts

By implementing Executive Insights 360, agencies now have accurate and consistent information from across the enterprise, establishing a “single source of truth” that leadership and employees can access and analyze for better decision making. This reduces data fragmentation and duplication, and reduces the risk of getting four different answers to the same question. Enterprise-wide visibility of agency metrics creates internal accountability and inspires staff to resolve, in real-time, declining mission performance, administrative backlogs or other business problems.

3. Measures and reports progress of leaders’ and the administration’s top priorities

From unfunded mandates and executive orders to new legislation, agency leaders must implement the administration’s priorities and their own management priorities for the agency. Leaders need to see how mandates and their agency goals are being fulfilled, and what the business or mission outcomes are to assess performance and inform future resource allocation. For example, if strengthening the agency’s workforce is a top priority, executives should have consumable views of human capital metrics on attrition, recruitment, demographics, retirement eligibility and employee survey results, among other KPIs. 

Leaders can use Executive Insights 360 to establish and drive toward common goals—a fundamental and transformative organizational achievement. Leaders can confidently report how top priorities are being advanced and executed to agency stakeholders and the White House.

With Executive Insights 360, answers are at leaders’ fingertips. No more waiting for multiple levels of staff to collate and analyze data. No more receiving four different answers to the same question, or doubting the provided answer.

Once implemented, Executive Insights 360 has transformative cultural effects on the entire agency. Employees no longer feel as though their data is proprietary. Rather, the entire organization owns all the data. Data is now appropriately and securely shared, analyzed, and used in ways that benefit the agency and its mission.

In this webinar, discover how executive analytics has scaled insight-driven decision-making across the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.