Decades ago while attending graduate school in Arizona, I volunteered some time at a church-operated farm west of Phoenix. The assignment was extracting honey from honeycombs that would ultimately be bottled and distributed to those in need through the church’s welfare system.

Before the honey could be extracted, the wax “cappings” of the honeycombs were cut away, revealing the gorgeous, amber-colored sweetness in the comb’s cells.

I could see the honey. I could smell its goodness. But the only way to reap its value was to place the wood-framed combs in the spinner or extractor, where the honey was then pulled out by centrifugal force. The process was repeated again and again.

Extracting the value IT brings to the business 

That sweet experience on the farm pops into my mind when I come across the data extraction capabilities of Xtraction from Ivanti.

The fact is, IT departments everywhere struggle to measure and communicate metrics around the value they bring to the business. Dashboards and reports play a vital role in your mission to modernize IT service management, but to be most effective, it’s necessary to grasp the required outcomes and priorities of different business managers within the organization.

The most valuable reports for the business are those that offer accurate insights into performance and how that translates into business impact. The right dashboards deliver value by highlighting areas to drive improvements. These reports and dashboards focus communication on what’s important to each of the business managers who are viewing the data, whether it is the CIO, VP of Operations, or the CEO.

Using data to drive past the competition

Creating this type of aggregated business view requires inputs from multiple data sources such as incident data, service availability, and cost.

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. However, the same study found that more than 70 percent of organizations that have data valuation processes in place are primarily collecting and analyzing data manually.

Data so close you can taste it

What if you had a way to grab dozens of data sources from dozens of systems, overlay them, and make them look fantastic?  

Xtraction brings together data from multiple vendors and multiple enterprise applications—each with their own reporting interface. In a single view, you can pull together and display data from enterprise systems like IT service management, IT asset management, client management, project management, and more. Pre-defined data connectors are available for BMC Remedy, Microsoft SCCM, VMware Service Manager, CA Spectrum, Cisco UCCX, and many more applications and relational data bases.

Report daily IT operations activity such as incidents, changes, and requests, or roll up to business value dashboards then drill down to focus on information important to your business managers. This self-service solution enables anyone to view and create reports and business-value executive dashboards without coding. Even those with limited technical or analytical knowledge can quickly extract data, create dashboards, and view actionable insights.

Here are several ways you can benefit by using Xtraction:

  • Comprehensive insight: View current IT status, track performance, and assess risks to take action now and plan future resources.
  • C-Suite views: View high-level, business-aligned dashboards at a glance with red/amber/green IT metrics and financial impact.
  • Unified data: Cross-reference data from multiple systems easily. See the big picture, the little picture, or...as much of the picture you care to see.
  • One simple interface: Get one view, one dashboard...or one chart on that dashboard! No need to open each IT application anymore.
  • Build reports yourself: Don't wait in line for days to get a custom-coded report built. Do it yourself in minutes.
  • Data for you, him, her: Present only what's important to each team member or executive and stop cluttering your life.
  • Deeper dives: Explore data to unlock hidden value. Find lost assets, a new service opportunity, or vulnerable devices.
  • Collaborate and share: View and share business-critical data. Make decisions based on accurate data...not based on who's loudest.