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As a CEO, what is your Airspeed indicator?

As a CEO, what
is your Airspeed
indicator?

  19/02/2020

As a CEO, what is your Airspeed indicator?

29/01/2020

Dashboarding your future

When a pilot is flying an aircraft the most important ‘dashboard’ is that which displays the airspeed. Should the Airspeed fall below a certain threshold the aircraft risks stalling and over speeding will place additional unwanted stress on the airframe.

“There are three speeds pilots use during takeoff and when making any decision. V1, Rotate (Vr) and V2” https://eu.usatoday.com/

A small but very important point is that the pilot not flying announces to the pilot flying these three critical speeds. As a CEO who is your co-pilot relaying these critical readings? your CFO/CTO/CIO, Dashboard or a hybrid?

With this in mind, as a decision-maker within your organization what is your Air Speed indicator? What is that one most important figure which must be kept within strict boundaries and used to facilitate decision making? Do you have many sources of information being merged into a monthly excel sheet?

A sales oriented CEO would focus on the closure rate, a CFO potentially focusing on the Debt percentage to revenue and a shareholder on profitability.

Each position and industry comes with different challenges, hence a different ‘air speed’ indicator is required. The exciting part of any business is how to extract this one dashboard amidst the array of data present in modern day organizations and how to design the dashboard in a way so that its useful and future proof.

They say “With the right dashboard you’ll be confident in every decision & have a real time birds eye view of your business!” but the key here is the right dashboard. Once you have defined what critical information the dashboard should contain, it’s time to implement it. For a dashboard to be useful, it needs to offer information that helps drive business decisions in real-time, usually by combining different sources of data and monitoring key performance metrics.

Zak Borg,
Partner
Fact: Up at 4:45am 💪

ABOUT ONEST  

Zak Borg,
Partner
Fact: Up at 4:45am 💪

ABOUT ONEST  

Dashboarding your future

When a pilot is flying an aircraft the most important ‘dashboard’ is that which displays the airspeed. Should the Airspeed fall below a certain threshold the aircraft risks stalling and over speeding will place additional unwanted stress on the airframe.

“There are three speeds pilots use during takeoff and when making any decision. V1, Rotate (Vr) and V2” https://eu.usatoday.com/

A small but very important point is that the pilot not flying announces to the pilot flying these three critical speeds. As a CEO who is your co-pilot relaying these critical readings? your CFO/CTO/CIO, Dashboard or a hybrid?

With this in mind, as a decision-maker within your organization what is your Air Speed indicator? What is that one most important figure which must be kept within strict boundaries and used to facilitate decision making? Do you have many sources of information being merged into a monthly excel sheet?

A sales oriented CEO would focus on the closure rate, a CFO potentially focusing on the Debt percentage to revenue and a shareholder on profitability.

Each position and industry comes with different challenges, hence a different ‘air speed’ indicator is required. The exciting part of any business is how to extract this one dashboard amidst the array of data present in modern day organizations and how to design the dashboard in a way so that its useful and future proof.

They say “With the right dashboard you’ll be confident in every decision & have a real time birds eye view of your business!” but the key here is the right dashboard. Once you have defined what critical information the dashboard should contain, it’s time to implement it. For a dashboard to be useful, it needs to offer information that helps drive business decisions in real-time, usually by combining different sources of data and monitoring key performance metrics.

In a dashboard, you can usually track your revenue over time based on past data. However, by applying a Regression Machine Learning model to predict revenues, you can also project revenues into the future, and see the predictions update in real-time, as changes that affect revenue occur in your business.

You might want to apply Machine Learning to several other problems, depending on your business and industry, and then monitor them consistently through a central dashboard.

Design plays a vital role when Dash-boarding, going in without the necessary preparation will result in a dashboard that has no “good feel factor” and wont be used. Hence the necessary time must be spent designing the dashboard which best suits you as the decision maker.

This bad dashboard is by a transportation improvement board. This example highlights how dashboard design can often go wrong.

• The fill effects that have been used on the pie chart in the top left hand corner are completely unnecessary and make it difficult to interpret the size of each slice.

• More worrying however, is the fact that there is a legend to the right of it as well as a number of data labels underneath. This makes it extremely difficult to interpret what information the chart is actually displaying, especially at a glance.

A Bad Dashboard

This bad dashboard is by a transportation improvement board. This example highlights how dashboard design can often go wrong.

• The fill effects that have been used on the pie chart in the top left hand corner are completely unnecessary and make it difficult to interpret the size of each slice.

• More worrying however, is the fact that there is a legend to the right of it as well as a number of data labels underneath. This makes it extremely difficult to interpret what information the chart is actually displaying, especially at a glance.

A Bad Dashboard

A Good Dashboard

This dashboard example is a great example of how a simple structure can be used effectively to display information.

• The dashboard looks visually appealing but does not draw attention away from the data itself by using distracting and unnecessary graphics.

• The colour scheme used throughout the dashboard helps it to look bright, clean and clear.

• The amount of data presented in each graph is sufficient enough to provide value without looking cluttered and hard to interpret.

A Good Dashboard

This dashboard example is a great example of how a simple structure can be used effectively to display information.

• The dashboard looks visually appealing but does not draw attention away from the data itself by using distracting and unnecessary graphics.
• The colour scheme used throughout the dashboard helps it to look bright, clean and clear.
• The amount of data presented in each graph is sufficient enough to provide value without looking cluttered and hard to interpret.

The dashboard must become part of your everyday life, it must have what we call the feel good factor which is only achieved via an iterative design process: Discovery, Wireframing, Styling, Implementation, Testing.

The dashboard must become part of your everyday life, it must have what we call the feel good factor which is only achieved via an iterative design process: Discovery, Wireframing, Styling, Implementation, Testing.

8 steps to launching your own
dashboard

8 steps to launching your own
dashboard

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