Events
Using a CIO dashboard to run IT like a business
Updated Sept. 8, 2022
In an era when digital transformation has become a necessity, the spotlight is on IT. How is it performing? Is it delivering for the business? Is it shifting from being a cost center to an engine driving innovation and business growth?
IT’s evolution can take many directions, but it all starts at the same place: knowing where you are today. By understanding what’s working—and what isn’t—chief information officers (CIOs) and their teams can become empowered change agents. Enter the ServiceNow CIO Dashboard.
What is a CIO dashboard?
Our ServiceNow analytics team recognized an opportunity to create a first-of-its-kind dashboard for our CIO and his leadership team. The goal was to provide a shared view of IT performance against the business’s top priorities.
Built on the Now Platform, the CIO Dashboard app features a user interface powered by the Next Experience and key performance indicators collected using Performance Analytics.
The dashboard brings key insights into a single pane from various ServiceNow applications: IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), IT Asset Management, Security Operations, and Strategic Portfolio Management.
These insights answer critical business questions across five key decision areas for the CIOs of modern IT organizations and are derived from the content packs available with each application. The CIO Dashboard can also integrate data and metrics from systems and sources outside of ServiceNow.
Figure 1: CIO Dashboard overview
Insights to action across IT operations
The CIO Dashboard lets the IT leadership team quickly see project updates, such as a breakdown of service-level agreements by priority status and the total number of active projects (see Figure 1). The dashboard focuses on five top business priorities for CIOs and the modern IT organization:
IT’s contribution to company growth
Infrastructure and operations health
Security and protection
Strategic programs execution
User experiences
Having all five areas in view gives team members a reading on the IT organization as a whole and directs their attention to areas that need it. With a click, IT leaders can drill down into transactional data and applications to gain granular insights within each category. Let’s take a closer look.
Value
Business value and organizational growth is a top focus area for CIOs. By contributing to go-to-market activities and company revenue—and driving productivity and cost savings from digital transformation—our IT leadership team plays a key role in margin expansion and growth.
The CIO Dashboard pulls together real-time revenue and cost insights that help us thrive (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: CIO Dashboard value view
Operations
Operational stability and infrastructure health is another strategic area for CIOs. The IT leadership team wants answers to questions such as:
Are we maximizing our investments?
Are we resolving issues in a timely manner?
Are we handling requests effectively?
Using data from ITSM, ITOM, and IT Asset Management, the CIO Dashboard helps leaders understand IT performance and identify areas of opportunity across incident management, request management, cloud governance, and more (See Figure 3).
Figure 3: CIO Dashboard operations view
Security
Security plays a crucial role in any corporate environment. At ServiceNow, we need to manage security vulnerabilities, incidents, and responses. We also need to ensure compliance with regulations and mandates to keep our business, employees, and customers safe.
Using data from Security Operations, the CIO Dashboard helps us understand our risk profile so we can quickly act on security gaps and help mitigate breaches (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: CIO Dashboard security view
Execution
To drive innovation, our IT leadership team needs to make business-aligned strategic investments. Ensuring initiatives are on target and within budget requires ongoing updates to ideas, demand pipelines, timelines, and resource and cost allocations.
Using insights from Strategic Portfolio Management, the CIO Dashboard helps the team prioritize and modify investments to grow and shape the business today and into the future (see Figure 5).
Figure 5: CIO Dashboard execution view
Experience
CIOs and their teams need to deliver IT products and services that provide great end-user experiences. This includes engaging and supporting users through digital self-service channels such as virtual agents and knowledge bases.
The CIO Dashboard lets us measure the success of our experience programs and the sentiments of end users through surveys defined in ITSM (see Figure 6). We can also identify and roll out enhancements that take the user experience from so-so to second to none.
Figure 6: CIO Dashboard experience view
Cost center to innovation engine
For us, the CIO Dashboard isn’t just a robust status report—it’s a portal to action. Each real-time insight within the dashboard links to transactional data and source systems where immediate actions can be taken to correct course. All linked source data is accessible wherever needed, via desktop or mobile device.
This easy-to-configure application accelerates time to value and saves development costs. With a single view of IT performance against top priorities, IT leadership teams can access and analyze current data and fix issues or change directions. This results in closer alignment with corporate objectives and greater ability to innovate.
The CIO Dashboard is available in the ServiceNow Store and is free for ServiceNow customers. Find out more about the CIO Dashboard.
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