Killing PowerPoint, not too softly
ServiceNow's NowForum London 2016 featured a good proportion of hands-on labs as well as applied sessions delivered to serve the practical needs of users across a variety of levels, in a plethora of use cases.
When other conferences schedule the late afternoon 'graveyard shift' and struggle to keep attendees awake, ServiceNow welcomed a pair of speakers from secure payments services processing company Worldpay to liven up the end of the afternoon's proceedings.
Worldpay's Toby Isaacson is ITSM Analytics Transformation Lead and the firm's Jason Scott-Taggart is Head of Technology Operations. The pair teamed up for a session entitled 'Killing PowerPoint with Performance Analytics'.
But why would we want to kill PowerPoint anyway?
"I have spent hours copying and pasting information from one BI tool or another and presenting it in spreadsheets only to come up with something dull and unappealing," said Isaacson.
Static & retrospective is old
His point was made to reinforce the fact that when the typical user undertakes a performance intelligence review, he or she will usually spend hours putting together information and ultimately end up with something that is very static and essentially retrospective.
If we only measure IT project performance once a month then we only have a very small window in terms of the time at hand in which to act. This is the only period we have available to take actions that will move a firm's strategic progress in the right direction. The problem in this kind of time frame is that business priorities will very often change inside the window in question.
A far more dynamic way of working is needed.
"When we use traditional ETL (extract, transform and load) BI tools to present a dashboard of graphs that have been exported to the presentation layer, we fail to get the kind of ability to drill into specific datasets and ask additional questions of the data that we are working with. A single data source feeds a single point in time in the old model and there are little or no opportunities to perform proactive analytics," said Isaacson.
Instead, a technology review has to be able to highlight the status of all machines in much shorter time windows.
Rod Bridgeman at ServiceNow joined the Worldpay team on stage to help the demonstration.
"Business leaders have to make decisions based upon reports that typically hold only 10 percent of the information that they need," said Bridgeman.
Confidence bands, wrapped up
Using ServiceNow's approach to performance analytics, a particular set of data can be worked with in a far more dynamic way. We can start to create confidence bands and trend lines that were previously unavailable. We can look at the data and start to find outliers to see where and when to look for anomalies.
"We tried to add hyperlinks into our previous use of Business Objects and the type of functionality wasn't there," explained Isaacson. "With ServiceNow, you can start big… but then focus small. We can ask 'what data do I need right now' and then drill into specific aspects and of data and the relationships that exist in between different datasets."
Is PowerPoint dead yet?
So if we adopt these new methods and tools, will ServiceNow to help us undertake performance analytics in a better, faster, stronger and altogether less painful way? Will that ultimately lead to the final execution and ritual murder of PowerPoint itself?
Answer: no, of course not, PowerPoint still has its functional uses and anyway, the animations can be a whole lot of fun.
What ServiceNow can say with some certainty is that with the adoption of new methods and tools a potential leap forward in efficiency happens. Reports start to take 2-3 hours not 2-3 days… and we gain the ability to think ahead and build more proactive plans for the future.
ServiceNow promises to make really Agile IT happen and allow firms to avoid 'data blindness' because the platform enables firms to take action while events are actually happening.
The end result is employee empowerment through information access… and that leads to new ways of working, and yes, with fewer PowerPoint slide decks.
