All the Data You Need, Right Before Your Eyes

Dashboards and reports are vital to modernizing IT service management, but to be most effective, it’s necessary to understand the required outcomes and priorities of different business managers within the organization.

The most valuable reports are those that offer accurate insights into performance and how that translates into business impact.

Valuable dashboards highlight areas to drive improvements. These reports and dashboards focus communication on what’s important to each business manager viewing the data—the CIO, VP of Operations, or the CEO.

It’s time to embrace a value-based approach that ties IT performance and measurement to business outcomes. Only then can you add value by disclosing insights in a business-centric way. This aggregated business view requires inputs from multiple data sources such as incident data, service availability, and cost.

Market research firm IDC predicts that by 2017, 80 percent of CIOs will have a plan in place centered on using data to drive the business past its competition. The same IDC study found that more than 70 percent of organizations that have data valuation processes in place are primarily collecting and analyzing data manually.

Use reporting tools to avoid manual, time-intensive analysis. These tools roll up old-school metrics to dashboards in a way that individual systems and tools can’t achieve easily:

• Offer the context of business impact alongside standard performance metrics.
• Ensure that dashboard data can be filtered easily so any business user can dig into the results and make a fast decision that matches your modern-responsive ITSM operation.
• Enable your service management teams to communicate effectively to business decision-makers and stay relevant to the business.

The foundation for value

The value of timely dashboards with relevant data cannot be overstated. Using visualizations that are intuitive and easy to interpret, these dashboards help managers quickly determine:

• The current state of where they are.
• If they’re on track to meet objectives.
• What changes or fine-tuning are required to stay on course.