Government CIOs: Here’s How to Communicate With Your Peers

Before you can build a dashboard, you need to define your audience, including the mission-related and wider business outcomes they care about:

• Gather information about the audience’s mission from a variety of sources, such as organizational strategy documents and strategic roadmaps, public statements or stakeholder interviews.

• Answer key questions to identify mission outcomes. For example: What citizen-facing services does the organization provide? Which are the most critical initiatives for a business unit or function? What direction are peers in your tier of government taking to achieve their organizational goals?

• Look for commonalities between different government stakeholders’ desired outcomes. Avoid taking a siloed approach by synthesizing the goals of different areas.

At the end of this exercise, you should have a list of three to five aggregated, role-specific outcomes that will resonate with stakeholders and to which you can tie your technology initiatives. 

A value story is a compelling narrative, supported by evidence, that demonstrates how IT generates value. It must be aligned to the mission or business outcomes you have just established, tailored to stakeholder priorities, and concise and easy to communicate. 

IT value stories fall into two main categories: 

• “Run the business ” ─ maintaining high performance and current capabilities, such as by preventing a major public service failure. 

• “Change the organization” ─ expanding existing capabilities and delivering new ones, such as improving citizen satisfaction through existing channels and adopting new ones.  

Once done, you should be able to articulate how your technology initiatives support wider mission or business outcomes, focused on both run and change initiatives and using mission-appropriate language.

A value story is only as good as its metrics. Support your value story with metrics that fit the narrative and have a direct link (one-to-one impact) or strong causal link (provable impact) to your organization’s key outcomes.  

Do this by identifying and tying your traditional operational technology metrics — such as the availability of service channels— to outcome-driven metrics, which assess the effectiveness of objectives and technology in achieving your organizational goals. For example, to support the goal of achieving  a reduction in homelessness, shortlist both technology-outcome-driven metrics, such as claim completion rates, and the mission-outcome-driven metrics they underpin, such as eligible claimant submission rates. 

By the end of this exercise, your chosen metrics should be insightful and relevant to stakeholders and should adequately validate your value stories.

Prepare and build dashboards that are actionable as well as visually appealing. Then get a reality check via feedback from IT and service leaders to ensure they are suitable for stakeholders: 

• Get a handle on your stakeholder audience’s preferences. The cadence and style of the dashboard you will ultimately build is dictated by its intended audience and members need to make operational and strategic decisions.

• Reference examples you can use to create visually appealing dashboards. For each value story, highlight the current performance against metrics, critical initiatives undertaken, key successes achieved and proposed actions.

• After asking for feedback, identify areas that may need improvement, such as alignment of metrics, clear definition of metrics, relevance to audience and simplicity of presentation.