To approve the award of contract for a performance management system to digitally record Key Performance Indicator (KPI) data and the progress against the Council Plan Delivery Plan

That:

A contract for a new performance management system is awarded to the preferred supplier for a period of 3 years at a maximum cost of £87,000

1.     The council currently uses Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to record performance data, however, the complexity of performance data is not adequately addressed with the use of Excel which raises data quality concerns. For instance, there is a lack of audit and version control; higher risk of human error; limitations on data validation and data security; higher risk of data loss; and incompatibility with meeting current technological advances to improve efficiency, such as, an Application Programming Interface (API) where there is an automatic link to PowerBI (the data visualisation tool).

2.     Alternative options include the use of other current Microsoft products, such as, SharePoint and PowerBI. There are some benefits of using these alternative Microsoft products over Excel, however, these products still fall short on meeting the requirements as they are not specialist performance management software. For instance, SharePoint enables auditing of data changes, however, due to the rigidity of SharePoint’s structure, the remaining concerns above still remain. PowerBI is advantageous for its data visualisation and analytical capabilities, but still has several drawbacks when used as the primary tool for data recording and management. PowerBI is not designed for data entry or storage, and therefore, should not be used as a database; it relies on data sources, such as SQL databases, Excel files, or cloud services, such as a specialist performance management system.