EDS Dashboard To Aid Customers
General availability of the new product, dubbed Client Service Dashboard, is expected to be announced Dec. 10 during EDS' analyst day at the company's headquarters here, according to an EDS executive. The product will be part of EDS' Enterprise Performance Management line.
Sheila Talton, president of EDS' Business Process Innovation unit, said adding the dashboard provides a significant opportunity. "It really does open up a huge spectrum of engagement opportunity and pull-through revenue at EDS across all of our lines of business," Talton said.
The internal EDS Service Excellence Dashboard, first implemented in 1998, is a Web-based tool that tracks the company's realtime performance in accounts representing more than 90 percent of EDS' global revenue and more than 600 EDS Solutions Consulting clients.
If EDS is meeting client expectations, the system displays a green circle and detailed notes aside each project. A red square with notes, however, indicates a problem that demands immediate attention. Using the dashboard's blue-green-yellow-red color scale, consistently less than 1 percent of EDS' clients have been in the red, according to EDS.
The new version of the dashboard will let EDS customers track their own performance with their own clients. EDS hopes to offer consulting services leading up to the actual development of the dashboard, such as process and organization design, technology planning and change management.
"The work could also expand to new types of technology enablement systems that would have to be installed," Talton said. "Some component of that could even extend to include some level of business process outsourcing."
Michael Doane, an analyst at Meta Group, said in a recent CRM report that most consultancies fail to create lasting value for clients in a way that enables them to continuously improve their relationship. The EDS dashboard, he said, "is one way to make the results more tangible, since clients would have a way to measure their ongoing success."