Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, provide at-a-glance views of an aspect of an entity for a point in time against a certain goal value. This could be the total amount of gifts donated to a fund or the total number of registrants for an event.
Senior management requires information on the health of the organization. Key Performance Indicators are quantifiable measurements, agreed to beforehand, that reflect the critical success factors of an organization. A KPI is a single value that represents some measure of the operational status of an organization with regard to a certain topic, and that value is usually associated with a target or goal for the value so that the current value can be quantified vs. the goal.
Examples of KPIs might be:
Number of gifts received this month
Number of days to close a gift in the Major Giving pipeline
Total amount given to a campaign
Percentage of a goal reached for a campaign goal period
Response rate on a given appeal
Number of outstanding unacknowledged gifts
Average number of days to acknowledge a gift
Those are just samples, but each one represents a single value that could be calculated and compared to an established goal.
KPI Features in Infinity
The Infinity platform provides the following features to support an organization establishing, monitoring, and reporting on KPIs.
A framework and user interface to establish, secure, and manage KPIs
A way to express a goal for a KPI
A way to define warning and alert zones for a KPI as it progresses toward or deviates from its goal
An automated process to calculate KPI values and cache those values for quick rendering at a later time
A mechanism to back-calculate KPI values to establish historical trends
A standard list to render KPI values
RSS support for KPI values so they can be monitored without running the application
A personal dashboard that end users can customize to display the KPIs they consider most important and relevant
The ability to view the dashboard outside the application from any web browser without having to log in and navigate the application
A stock set of KPI calculations that come standard with an Infinity application
Author New KPIs
Infinity is extensible in regards to KPIs in that via the standard catalog mechanism, there is no limit to the number or kinds of KPIs that can be defined. An Infinity SDK software developer may create new KPIs. There is a specific catalog item type called KPI Spec that a developer authors to express how to calculate a KPI. The spec includes metadata about any parameters to the calculation and what type of numeric value the calculation yields.
Web Shell Readiness Alert. While a feature that utilizes a FormUIComponent XML element in the spec works in the ClickOnce Smart Client, the presence of the FormUIComponent element signifies that a conversion is necessary to view the feature in the Web Shell. A UI Model must be generated for the form field parameters before the feature will work in the Web Shell user interface. At a high level, a conversion is accomplished by first generating a UI Model and replacing the FormUIComponent element with the WebUIComponent element. For more information, see User Interface, Frequently Asked Questions, and Features that Require a Conversion to Webshell.
KPI Roles
A KPI administrator can create many KPI instances from a single KPI Spec (KPI). The KPI is analogous to a cookie cutter that is used to cut out similarly shaped cookies or KPI instances. Each KPI instance can be decorated with different goals, calculation parameters, milestones, and permissions.
The KPI consumer is the end user of an Infinity application or an executive who typically never runs an Infinity application but just wants a way to monitor the company’s strategic goals by viewing the value of a KPI instance.
After a KPI (KPI Spec) is loaded from the catalog, an administrator can create an instance of that KPI. This pattern is very similar to the smart query pattern where you can create multiple named instances from a single definition.