Taming the Reporting Beast: A Guide to ServiceNow Governance

[Jeff Benedict]

In many organizations, the ServiceNow reporting landscape resembles the Wild West. Reports are created on the fly by anyone and everyone, leading to a sprawling, chaotic environment. You end up with dozens of reports that look similar but show different results, inconsistent metric calculations, and a fundamental lack of trust in the data. When nobody trusts the numbers, making informed, strategic decisions becomes impossible.

This is where reporting governance comes in. It’s not about restricting access or stifling creativity; it’s about creating guardrails that ensure your data is consistent, reliable, and valuable. By establishing a clear framework for how reports are created, managed, and retired, you can transform your reporting environment from a source of confusion into a powerhouse of actionable insight.

Step 1: Establish Clear Ownership with Roles and Responsibilities

A successful governance model begins with a simple question: who owns the report? Without clear ownership, reports become orphaned, data quality degrades, and accountability is lost. Your governance framework must define who is responsible for what. As outlined in the provided governance model, key roles include:

• Business Process Owners: These individuals are accountable for the content of the reports. They validate the business requirements, ensure the output is accurate and relevant to their process area, and ultimately sign off on the report's fitness for use.
• Data Stewards: Working hand-in-hand with Business Process Owners, Data Stewards are the guardians of data quality. They ensure consistency and integrity across data sources, making sure the foundational data feeding into the reports is accurate.
• Platform Team/Owner: This team is responsible for the technical health of the reporting platform. They manage performance, ensure stability, handle deployments, and enforce access and security controls.
• Governance Committee: This cross-functional group, composed of key stakeholders, provides oversight. They are responsible for approving reporting standards, prioritizing new requests, and ensuring the entire process aligns with broader business objectives.

By defining these roles and responsibilities in a formal RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix, you eliminate ambiguity and ensure every aspect of the reporting lifecycle has a clear owner.

Step 2: Certify Key Reports to Create a "Trusted Source"

Not all reports are created equal. Some are quick, ad-hoc queries for an individual's use, while others are critical dashboards used by leadership to make strategic decisions. A powerful governance strategy is to create a distinction between "Non-Certified" and "Certified" reports.

• Non-Certified Reports: These are for personal or team-specific use. They are ad-hoc, serve a niche purpose, and are managed by the user who created them.
• Certified Reports: These are the official, vetted reports that serve as the "trusted source" for the organization. For a report to be scheduled or appear on a shared dashboard, it must go through a formal certification process.

This process ensures the report has been reviewed for accuracy by the Business Process Owner, built according to development standards, and aligned with agreed-upon KPIs. When users see a "certified" badge, they know they can trust the data, eliminating the need to second-guess the numbers or create their own competing versions.

Step 3: Monitor and Retire Reports for a Healthy Ecosystem

A reporting environment is like a garden; it requires constant tending. Without it, weeds—in the form of unused, outdated, and irrelevant reports—will quickly take over, choking out the valuable ones. An effective lifecycle management process is essential for maintaining a clean and efficient reporting ecosystem.

This involves actively monitoring the reporting landscape. Your governance framework should include KPIs to track report health, such as:

• Inactive Reports: Identify reports that haven't been viewed in the last 60 or 90 days.
• Duplicate Reports: Find reports with significant content overlap that can be consolidated.
• Orphaned Reports: Locate reports with no assigned owner.

Armed with this data, the Governance Committee and Business Process Owners can make informed decisions to retire what is no longer valuable. Decommissioning unused reports is not just a cleanup exercise; it improves system performance, reduces clutter, and makes it easier for users to find the information they actually need.

By implementing a governance strategy, you can bring order to the chaos, build trust in your data, and unlock the full decision-making power of the ServiceNow platform.