Welcome and thank you for taking the time to help us with our survey.

Knowing what is going on in your business is vital to its success. It is widely acknowledged that businesses spend a disproportionate amount of time collecting, collating, cleansing and presenting data, rather than the analysis itself. Establishing the current state of performance consumes far more time than looking at ways to change business processes to help make business run better and more profitably.

For big business, the solution is to implement “Business Dashboards”. These are software driven applications that take key performance information from the business, and publish this information in a graphical dashboard format. This allows users to see in real time what is happening in their business, and armed with this information, to make quicker and more accurate business management decisions. And as everyone in business knows, quicker and more accurate decision making means a better run and more profitable company.

Small and medium business (SME’s) have to date been excluded from using this style of management for several reasons, primarily, the cost of purchasing and implementing this type of application can be high. Our aim is to make this technology available to all business, with particular focus on the SME market, at minimal or no cost to the user.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are financial and non-financial measures used to help an organization define and evaluate how successful it is, typically in terms of making progress towards its long-term organizational goals. KPIs can be specified by answering the question, "What is really important to the success of my business". KPIs may be monitored using Business Intelligence techniques to assess the present state of the business and to assist in prescribing a course of action.

The KPIs differ depending on the nature of the organization and the organization's strategy and the market that the business operates in. They help to evaluate the progress of an organization towards its vision and long-term goals.

This survey will identify the top KPI’s within each size or type of business. This information will be used to develop industry specific dashboard templates, which can be used with a selection of companies to determine the suitability of use.

Again, many thanks for taking this survey, your responses will help us to help all Small and Medium sized business in the East of England.