What to Consider When Building a SaaS Management Executive Dashboard

Successful SaaS Management Requires Executive Prioritization and Commitment

SaaS Management is not just a departmental task – it’s a company-wide program. To ensure it is prioritized, you must have executive support. Engaging your CIO and/or CFO elevates SaaS Management to a company-wide priority, fostering cooperation and alignment across departments. 

Yet, that’s easier said than done. One way to gain executive prioritization and commitment to your SaaS Management program is with an executive dashboard.

Executives want concise reporting on key metrics that matter to them. When data is convoluted or comes with caveats, they lose interest and start questioning its relevance. Plus, sharing (and reading) the information can be time consuming, especially when you use spreadsheets (Excel) or presentation decks (PowerPoint). Who wants to scroll through endless rows, columns, and pages to decode the data?

“If you consider how many functions and teams interact with software, from planning procurement to the end of a software lifecycle, it’s clear that alignment cannot solely be achieved by a SAM team or a SaaS Management program alone. It invariably requires an executive sponsor.”

— Shravya Ravi, Head of Software and IT Hardware Asset Management at LinkedIn

The solution?

Implementing a dynamic SaaS Management executive dashboard can address these challenges. The dashboard should be easy to understand and use and also:

• Highlight Key Metrics: Display metrics that track progress toward your company’s strategic objectives, helping cement the dashboard as a critical tool in executive decision making.
• Reinforce Business Value: Use visualizations to demonstrate how SaaS Management drives business value for the company, ensuring that the value provided is both perceivable and tangible.
• Facilitate Decision Making: Design the dashboard to provide actionable insights, not just data, enabling executives to make informed decisions quickly and effectively.

By using a dynamic executive dashboard, you ensure that essential data is accessible, compelling and straightforward. Ultimately, it facilitates better decision-making and stronger executive engagement in your SaaS Management efforts. An executive dashboard essential for aligning SaaS Management with broader business objectives, demonstrating ongoing value, and securing executive support to drive success.

5 Considerations When Building a SaaS Management Executive Dashboard

An executive dashboard is a crucial component of the reporting function within a SaaS Management Platform (SMP). It serves as a visual representation of data and a strategic tool that aligns with and supports the company’s broader goals. When planning your executive dashboard, keep these five key considerations in mind to ensure it effectively meets the needs of your organization and its leaders.

1. Your Company’s Strategic Goals

The primary purpose of your SaaS Management dashboard should be to demonstrate how SaaS initiatives support the company’s strategic objectives. This means that the data presented must directly correlate with what the company aims to achieve in the broader scope. Common strategic goals that SaaS Management can support include:

• Maximizing the Value of Software Investments: Ensure that every dollar spent on software brings a return, highlighting usage versus expenditure.
• Reducing Costs: Identify areas where you can optimize software spending without sacrificing performance.
• Strengthening Security Posture: Provide data points that show improvements in security measures and compliance.
• Achieving Operational Excellence and Efficiency: Demonstrate how SaaS solutions enhance operational workflows and reduce redundancies.
• Improving Employee Experience: Show correlations between SaaS applications and employee satisfaction or productivity.
• Driving Innovation: Highlight how investment in new SaaS tools fosters innovation within the company or the funds you unlock via cost optimization to support innovation initiatives.

2. Keep It High Level

The executive dashboard should not be overwhelmed with data. Instead, focus on what’s most important to your executive team. Include key metrics that provide a snapshot of the SaaS landscape within your organization:

• Total Number of SaaS Apps: Offers a quick overview of the software tools at your company’s disposal and insight into the extent of your SaaS sprawl.
• Total Annual SaaS Spend and Cloud Infrastructure Spend: These figures provide insight into your company’s investment in SaaS.
• Expensed Apps: Shows spending on apps outside of regular procurement channels. It’s a good meter for evaluating whether your governance policies and processes are working.
• Unapproved Expensed Apps and Applications with Multiple Channel Spend: These metrics highlight potential compliance issues or purchasing inefficiencies.
• New App Requests and Cost-Saving Opportunities: Indicate areas for potential expansion or optimization.
• Apps Expensed in the Past 30 Days and Cost per User: Provide immediate financial insights to drive quick decision-making.

3. Tell the “What’s in It for Me?” Story

When presenting data, it’s vital to frame it in a way that resonates with each executive’s interests and responsibilities. The executive dashboard should convey information and tell a compelling story of how SaaS Management makes a difference, appealing to each stakeholder’s priorities.

Siroui Mushegian, CIO at Barracuda Networks, calls it the ‘what’s in it for me’ story. “You have to find the currency that’s important for each leader that’s going to grab them and make them interested. Dollar signs are really pervasive across all stakeholders,” explained Mushegian.

By addressing what’s important to each stakeholder, you can create a SaaS Management executive dashboard that delivers impactful data and meaningfully engages executives. Pairing that with a ‘what’s in it for me’ story reinforces their commitment and support for your SaaS Management program.

Listen to the podcast clip below for more from Siroui Mushegian on telling ‘what’s in it for me’ stories around SaaS Management.

4. Report on Progress Regularly

To keep your executive team engaged, it’s important to meet regularly – at least quarterly. Consider it a routine health checkup but for your SaaS Management program. Sure, nothing is wrong right now. But how else do you measure progress or watch for problems on the horizon? 

Regular reporting helps demonstrate the continuing value of your SaaS Management program and monitor its health through scheduled check-ins. As an added bonus, it helps enhance accountability and drive prioritization of key business opportunities.

Your executive team should always have access to a dynamic SaaS Management dashboard. However, we all know how busy they are. Automate the distribution of the dashboard to executives ahead of the conversation. Then, it becomes a more effective and strategic discussion the day of the meeting.

“In a quarterly rhythm, we provide our executives a snapshot of how we’re doing with tech governance. That includes everything from identifying where we have opportunities, to detailing where we’ve successfully reduced licenses, to strategizing big decisions for the next quarter around upcoming contracts, licenses, and partnerships.”

— Trenton Cycholl, VP of IT and Digital Business at ModMed

5. Build Rapport with Your Executive Team

Beyond the figures and graphs, building solid relationships with your executive team is vital for the success of any reporting strategy. Gaining this rapport helps build mutual trust, ensuring the focus stays on the information you bring to the table.  

“The next move was figuring out how to get this in front of our executives and make it a critical corporate objective that needs everyone’s attention,” shared Mushegian. “I developed a strong rapport with the executive team, ensuring that when I joined the leadership team meetings, I brought something significant—a problem that needed awareness or support.”

Get Powerful Executive Reporting for SaaS Management with Zylo’s Dashboards & Custom Widgets

With Zylo’s Dashboards & Custom Widgets, communicating SaaS data, insights, and the overall business impact of SaaS Management to executive leadership becomes straightforward and impactful. Zylo offers the most flexible configuration of dashboards and widgets available, making it easier than ever to demonstrate the value your program brings, identify top opportunities for improvement, and monitor the overall performance of your SaaS Management efforts.

Using Dashboards & Custom Widgets helps you:

• Cut Through the Noise: Focus on the metrics that matter most, reducing the time spent analyzing data and increasing operational efficiency.
• Streamline Dashboard Creation and Assignment: Ensure that the right people have access to the right information exactly when needed.
• Personalize the Experience: Tailor each user’s dashboard to their specific needs and role within the SaaS Management ecosystem, enhancing relevance and effectiveness.

Ready to see how Zylo can transform your SaaS Management reporting? Request a demo today and start making better-informed decisions that drive your business forward.