I recently came across the Vizualize.me site and decided to give a try based on my LinkedIn account profile. I must admit that the idea is simple but brilliant. The site rapidly helps you turn your LinkedIn profile into a beautiful and meaningful set of charts and graphics highlighting your personal and professional data. Build and customize your own professional viz !
A recent survey said that HR and recruiters don’t want to spend more than 30 seconds reading a CV. Text resumes are easily boring and most of the times too prolific. Vizualizing your data should be the future way of promoting yourself.
Just a quick post to share a technique on finding lots of those ever-so-fascinating Magic Quadrant reports from Gartner.
A lot of you have been asking how I dig up the actual reports. Yes, they can be hard to find.
Here is the trick:
Companies that get mentioned favorably in the Gartner Magic Quadrant reports like to get the rights to distribute them. You can find them available for download in their websites. Most often you have to go through a registration process to get them but here’s a quick way to find them using Google.
We take advantage of a consistent “footprint” in the reports themselves. (remember all those pattern findng tricks we’d do back in the day to do screen scrapiing?).
Here’s a sweet find for you enterprise dashboard designers out there. You know how you are always on the look out for cool graphics for your business intelligence interfaces and enterprise dashboards? Well, get ready to do some downloading because I’ve found a nice free set of icons and graphics that you’ll want to incorporate into your business dashboards.
Click on the graphics to go to the download location.
Take a look at these dashboard alert boxes:
And here are some very nice dashboard navigation menus.
For more dashboard icons go to the main post here:
Watch this excellent video to learn about the 5 metrics all small businesses need to monitor. CEOs need to monitor the following Key Performance Indicators regardless of the maturity of their business:
Cost per acquisition – CPA is measured in various ways, but the best way is to roll up all sales and marketing costs for the month and divide by the number of customers acquired that month. If your sales cycle is 6 months, then use the sales and marketing expense from six months ago as the numerator and use this month’s unit sales as the denominator.
Revenue per employee – We measure revenue per employee on a monthly basis, dividing total revenue by the number of employees and then multiplying by 12 months to get an annualized number. Tracking this figure each month has enabled us to make sound hiring decisions, manage our expenses, and be accountable to the labor investments we make.
Customer loyalty – What you want to know here is how referable your business is. When you’re likely to be referred, you get leverage on those marketing and sales dollars spent each month. Therefore, the higher the referability, the more you can invest in CPA.
Lifetime customer value – When you know how much a customer is worth to you over the life of the customer, your decision-making improves significantly. You also know how profitable and healthy your business model is, how effective tweaks in your model are and how to adjust as you grow.
This metric is a super-metric because it is comprised of two critically important drivers of the business model. LCV = Average Revenue Per User / Churn. So, you can increase your LCV by increasing the ARPU or by decreasing the churn. Play with this equation and it doesn’t take long to realize that churn rate is what makes or breaks a business model. Furthermore, slight reductions in churn can make massive improvements in LCV.
Usage. Every software company needs to know how its customers are using and adopting the software. There are those who feel otherwise, but I feel that any software company wanting to drive long-term value for its shareholders needs to drive usage. Usage is king. Everything else falls in line nicely when customers use the company’s software.
Dashboard Examples: Executive Dashboards for the Insurance Industry. This letter came to the Dashboard Spy recently:
Dear Dashboard Spy: How does one design an executive dashboard in the insurance industry? I’m in the process of designing a global Business Intelligence system in the form of executive dashboards for my organization. The goal is to understand the minimum perspectives that a executive dashboard in the insurance industry should include. Looking for diverse views from people on how have they designed dashboards or what key performance indicators or metrics such insurance dashboards should contain. Hoping you can help.
Well, you’ve come to the right place for dashboard examples. I dig through the archives for you. Meanwhile, here are a couple to check out:
