What is on the CEO’s desktop?
According to Business Week, we are in the era of the dashboard. CEOs like Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison and Jeffrey Immelt have shared what financial and operational metrics they are looking at.
What options are there for the GC?
Mitratech offers a TeamConnect Legal Executive Dashboard, which was on display at the recent LegalTech conference in New York. I don’t see any screenshots of the dashboard on the Mitratech site.
Interwoven also offers a legal dashboard for corporate legal departments. Again, no examples that I could find.
Corda offers general management dashboards, and thankfully does provide some examples.
As dashboards become more popular among corporate executives, we can expect more use by general counsel and managing partners.
But Business Week notes that the dashboard isn’t a panacea:
Even Ellison, one of the world’s richest men, concedes that technology — and the power it gives him — has it limits. “People have to be persuaded that it’s right,” he says.
GE’s Jeffrey Immelt also is described as a limited user, as he “…focuses on issues such as broad strategy and dealmaking that the technology can’t yet capture.”
They say you can’t manage what you can’t measure. In delivering corporate legal services, however, matters like service quality and client satisfaction aren’t easily made into simple metrics like “revenue growth by week” or “customer support call length per region.”
Sometimes you have to turn off the computer, walk out of your office, and ask the first person you see “How are things going?”
And then listen.