The "So what" question being answered

What has become apparent is that many different departments are collecting data and producing reports but this information doesn’t naturally lead to specific actions. For example a decrease in customer satisfaction rating or an increase in errors in orders doesn’t immediately tell us why this is happening, which areas are causing it and what are the immediate steps we can take. By segmenting the data down to each State and by linking the data across multiple streams we can start to look at cause and effect. For some of the data streams we will be able to go deeper into who placed the order, or who processed this step so that we can look for improvement areas. We will be careful to ask the “five whys� instead of looking for the “one who�. That is asking why five times to get to the root cause – why was the order wrong, because we had the wrong customer account number, why did we have the wrong account number, because there are multiple ones to choose from for the same customer, why wasn’t the right one selected, because… Get to the root cause and fix the reason for it occurring if usually is never the fault of the person but the process, system or training. The “one who� is when you go looking for the “one who� to blame.

 We can see the balanced scoreboard project becoming a magnet for data because people are starting to see that the combined view can lead us to specific actions. The next time someone looks at a report and says “so what� we will be able to answer them with a series of actions and next steps.