CEOs: Your Qlik Dashboards Are Costing You Time!

Why cluttered dashboards, vanity metrics, and over-reliance on visuals are killing executive decision speed.

Author

Glenda Carnate
September 14, 2025

Read time: 2.5 minutes

Dashboards were designed to simplify decisions. Instead, they’ve become a trap.

Executives are drowning in sheets, wasting time in meetings, and staring at flashy visuals that don’t deliver clarity. The result? Missed opportunities, slower decisions, and millions lost to poor reporting.

Here are five brutal truths about Qlik dashboards that every CEO needs to face, along with strategies for turning them into effective decision-making engines.

1. Dashboards Are Slowing You Down:

67% of executives fear missing key opportunities because they over-rely on dashboards (TheyDo, 2024).
Fix: Build dashboards that guide action instead of flooding leaders with tabs and metrics.

2. Too Many Sheets = Too Many Decisions Lost:

57% of executives report having less time to make critical decisions (Technology Magazine, 2024). Ten tabs later, the moment’s already gone.
Fix: Use Qlik’s story mode and sheet navigation to build one guided executive summary view.

3: Fancy Visuals Don’t Make CEOs Smarter:

Businesses lose $12.9 million every year due to poor data quality, inadequate reporting, and ineffective dashboard design (Funnel, 2025).
Fix: Ditch 3D scatterplots and complex visuals. Stick to simple KPIs, clean trend lines, and forecasts that drive clarity.

4. Vanity Metrics Are Poison:

70% of analytics projects fail due to poor adoption and misaligned business needs (MoldStud, 2025). Vanity metrics, such as clicks or views, don’t move the needle.
Fix: Focus on impact metrics, revenue, margin, retention, and churn. Use Qlik’s associative filtering to spotlight what matters.

5. CEOs Only Need Three Questions Answered:

Real-time dashboards improve decision-making speed by 20% (Livelytics, 2025). Leaders only care about three things:

  • Where are we now? → Headline KPIs (profit, revenue, retention)

  • Where are we headed? → Trends + forecasts

  • What must we do next? → Clear actions + alerts

Fix: Use set analysis and alerts to deliver insights + recommended actions instantly.

Key Takeaways:

  • Dashboard overload = lost opportunities. Speed is everything.

  • Executives don’t have time to click. One summary view beat 10 tabs.

  • Design drives ROI. Clean, simple visuals > flashy scatterplots.

  • Adoption fails when dashboards track vanity. Focus on impact metrics.

  • One dashboard, three questions. That’s all a CEO needs.

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