Understanding the Executive Dashboard

The Executive Dashboard shows you the ESG risks most relevant to your business, drawn from your own filings, peer disclosures, regulations and news, and scores them so you can see what needs attention.

It runs an automated analysis, curated by Datamaran's experts, over publicly available data. This article explains what the dashboard does, where its data comes from, and how to find your way around it.

Why this matters

• Add an outside-in view of risk to your Enterprise Risk Management, from sources beyond your own reporting
• Find blindspots where a risk matters externally but you have not yet disclosed or acted on it
• Give your board and senior leaders a clear, shareable read on emerging risks and how peers are responding
• Support your Annual Report and external risk reporting with a record of how each risk was assessed

How the Executive Dashboard works

The dashboard uses artificial intelligence, and specifically natural language processing, to read large amounts of text the way a person would. It then scores and groups the risks relevant to your industry, refined through content filtering, risk categorisation and the parameters you set when you build an analysis.

Where the data comes from

The analysis draws on four types of source:

• Company reports: SEC filings, Annual Reports, Integrated Reports, Sustainability Reports
• Hard laws: mandatory regulations
• Soft norms: voluntary initiatives
• Online news: media articles

How risks are built (the Ontology)

Every risk maps to Datamaran's Ontology, a patented catalogue of ESG+ topics maintained by our experts. It is structured as:

• around 400 Factors (for example, "Climate change adaptation & resilience")
• which form 99 Topics (for example, "Climate change risks & management")
• grouped into 36 Issues, each an ESG+ theme that appears in the dashboard as a risk (for example, "Climate change & GHG emissions")
• across 6 ESG+ categories: Economic, Employee, Environment, Governance, Innovation & Tech, and Social

So a risk in the dashboard is an Ontology Issue, broken down into the Topics and Factors that make it up. For how each risk is then scored, see the Summary tab methodology article.

Finding your way around

The dashboard has three tabs: Overview, Self-assessment view and Monitoring. From the Overview tab you can also open any risk to see its detail views.

The three tabs:

• Overview: your risks sorted into the Action Required and Monitored buckets. See Understanding the Overview tab 
• Self-assessment view: focus your ESG strategy against your material issues. See Focusing your ESG strategy
• Monitoring: track how your risks and regulatory landscape change over time. See Navigating the Monitoring tab 

Drilling into a risk (from the Overview tab):

• Summary: a business-level read on the risk. See Understanding the Summary tab of a risk 
• Drivers: what is driving the risk. See Understanding the Drivers tab of a risk
• Breakdown: the Topics and Factors behind the risk. See Understanding the Breakdown tab 

Managing your analyses:

• Set up an analysis: build and run an External Risk Analysis. See Setting up an External Risk Analysis
• Duplicate, update, export or delete an analysis. See Managing your Executive Dashboard analyses