Nigel Hollis’ recent piece on management dashboards is well worth a read.

In a nutshell, Hollis finds that these dashboards, as good as they are, are heavily focused on past performance and generally lack functionality that helps the user understand how well they are doing in working to achieve a given set of goals. As he notes:

“For example, it seems difficult to manage a brand or business if you cannot easily judge whether you are making progress toward your goals. As Lewis Carroll put it, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.” Yet only two dashboards measured progress toward explicit targets. I do not know whether most of the brand plans lacked specific objectives, or whether such measures were just not built into the dashboard.”

This strikes a chord with me as a market researcher. Much of our research is generally a “snapshot in time” focused on now. Far too little, according to the recent BCG study on our industry is strategic in nature. This innate weakness of market research is why I think that the industry will eventually converge in some way with strategic foresight and its emphasis on analyzing possible, probable and preferred futures.