Corporations take a page from the military's playbook

Posted 7/30/2002 - 10:30AM, by Hannibal
The first thing I thought of as I read this article on the "corporate cockpit" or "corporate dashboard" was a real- time strategy game, complete with resources, knobs, meters, zooming controls, etc. These dashboards aggregate and display data that are fed in from different collection points both internal and external to the company, like cash registers, inventory, stock market feeds, etc. This allows management to monitor vital business metrics as they change in real-time or near real-time. The dashboards are usually a site on an intranet where certain authorized managers can log in and see a company's vital statistics, but sometimes a "war room"-style command post is used instead.

G.E., which began this effort about two years ago, and which like Honeywell has taken a more incremental approach, last month put the capstone on its digital cockpit project. Dubbed the corporate cockpit, it charts the top-level performance of G.E.'s 11 primary business units, with numbers culled from each unit's individual cockpit. Only 45 of the top G.E. executives are authorized to see it.

The front page includes nine different categories ? including headcount, sales, orders and pricing, among others ? and the numbers that correspond to each unit. There are also tabs at the top of the page that display a page of nine graphs showing, for instance, NBC's ratings, the number of delinquent credit card accounts within G.E.'s card services division, and the price of benzene, a critical commodity for the plastics division.

Many of these statistics can be zoomed in on so that the manager can check out the underlying data that give the reasons behind the numbers. The dashboards also allow a manager to do some data mining in order to investigate underlying trends and causes.

The other thing that occurred to me after I thought of the RTS/coporpate dashboard parallel was this: just like in an RTS, a few well-timed glimpses of your opponent's screen can give you a huge competitive edge. Any company that chooses to go this route is dangling before competitors the mother of all corporate espionage targets. They're going to want military grade security for this type of project, and this means no government mandated back doors. I don't really follow the defense industry very closely, but I have read that the military has been moving toward exactly this kind of real-time data aggregation for battlefield management for quite some time. If this type of C3I (command, control, communications, and intelligence) model becomes widespread enough in the corporate world, the concomitant increase in the volume of encrypted data flowing in the private sector will make the job of Bush's growing domestic intelligence apparatus that much more difficult.