ITSM Platform Analytics and how to address reporting
Overview
Reporting provides the ability to visualize data so it can be consumed more easily so you can relate that to the business.
When considering reporting the level within the organization consuming the report needs to be considered. At each level in the organization the reporting needs will differ depending on the persona consuming.
Here are examples of reporting audiences for 3 different levels within an organization:
Higher level audiences may prefer to see important information at a single glance without having to hunt for it. Over-selling KPIs and executives and C-Level stakeholders can be detrimental – complex targets can be called into question and difficult to defend, especially if the derivation is complex.
Manager and Analysts may welcome more granular reports that reflect their understanding of the business and technical capabilities with the system. These roles are more likely to welcome drill-down functionality and accept different views and formats available.
Any report should be aligned to helping you understand if you are achieving a business objective, otherwise its data for data’s sake. These business objectives will have different levels (altitudes). One way to do this is consider 3 levels within the organization – Enterprise, Functional, Operational
What are the objectives are you’re trying to get? What value are you trying to seek?
e.g. “Help me implement and help me get maximum value out of the product and then help me translate that into business value that we can demonstrate”
When considering reporting there are mainly 2 types of indicators to consider
- Leading indicators look ahead and attempt to predict future outcomes
- Lagging indicators look at the past.
Objectives tend to be forward looking statements therefore consider leading indicators for those, whereas outcomes are something you are looking to have happened therefore use lagging indicators.
Reporting Discussions: The 5 Ws and How
Usually the ServiceNow supplied reports don’t specify an audience. One of the things that you’re going to have to figure out what is relative and important to an analyst, versus a manager, versus the CIO. One approach to doing this is “the 5 Ws and how”.
Breaking this down a bit more:
What
What are the current reports that are used? Can they provide examples? Can you advise who uses them and what decisions are made from them?
Don’t get caught in the trap that this is our monthly reporting debt that is needed to be produced every month, and you’ve got to reproduce this. Ask how it is used, because there may be things in there that are pretty worthless.
Where
Where are the reports going to be shown? One of the things that you need to determine is, how are you going to share the reports that you do develop in ServiceNow? Does it have to be in a static PDF? Once you send it out to a PDF then its static.Can they log in to ServiceNow?
When
When are they going to be used? How are they going to look at the KPIs or the targets? What decisions are they going to make? Why are the reports needed? What are they going to tell the viewer?
How
How should the data be presented? What are the reports, and when should the reports be updated?
Ultimately moving users away from static, distributed reports, to viewing the information within the ServiceNow instance is going to provide the most current reporting for the user.
ServiceNow Reporting Methods
Platform Analytics Experience
Overview
From Washington release Platform Analytics Experience provides improved analytics experiences like the new visualization designer, KPI details, and dashboards that are visible from the navigation left side menu. Previous to Washington analytics were part of a dedicated workspace which meant the analytics experiences to be somewhere in a disjointed workflow application.
Analytics serves many personas with many different use cases and therefore being part of the main platform and menu navigation brings improved analytics experiences with better usability and a modern and coherent a single analytics for all data in the platform.
To support this platform analytics experiences are data source agnostic, allowing the use of the same configuration and consumption analytics experiences regardless of the data source being used.
Analytics has a new dashboard UI which brings many new features, the largest being a dashboard that can be built in context of the rest of the analytics and supports the unified filters. This is a single filter solution that supports all data sources and a new proactive insights capability to show meaningful important insights directly in workspaces or dashboards.
In addition to the easy analytics consumption it comes with unified ways to create new analytics whether this is configuring analytics in line directly on the dashboard or within visualization designer, both are using the same configuration side panel which will make it easy to learn.
In general because platform analytics takes a unified approach the selection of the data source will define the analytics chart options available after. For example if the selection is indicator data based on performance analytics capability this will come with Predictive Analytics capabilities that can be applied to the charts. Similar type of specific chart and styling options will also be applicable with other out of box data
Using sources like user experience analytics metricbase and table reporting data to summarize platform analytics brings improved analytics experiences to configure more meaningful analytics content and assist users in the consumption of it with a robust, consistent and modern look and feel.
Implementer tip:
Have a look at
Platform Analytics - What is the Platform Analytics experience?
Platform Analytics - What will happen to my Reports?
Migration to Platform Analytics Experience
Platform Analytics Experience doesn’t differentiate between the various data sources. Previously when using analytics and reporting in the core UI these would have been in different menus related to a specific data source analytics type. For example the user would navigate into the view and run screen that would bring the current list of reports. Once migrated that will change where those reports will be data visualizations now accessed through the data visualization library and there isn’t any differentiation. Data visualizations with a specific data source type define if it was analytics built on a table like with reports or on indicator data like with those PA widgets.
A migration tool is supplied that guides you in the migration from classic reporting and performance analytics to the new Platform Analytics Experience.
The migration utility requires plugin, sn_par_mig_center, to be installed.
Generic UI of the Migration Center, where you can begin migrating Core UI Responsive Dashboards, Reports, PA widgets, and Interactive filters to the Platform Analytics experience and see the results. System Administrator will be able to start the move to Platform Analytics and collaborate with Analytics admins on reviewing the migration results.
See docs for further information
After migration all those reports and possible PA widgets will be visible in the data visualization library. Those certified or bookmarked data visualizations can be easily accessed directly from the analytics center. The editing of those data visualizations will be done through the visualization designer.
Within the platform analytics experience there are different views to see if a data visualization is shared with the user or if it's one that the user may of created. The favorite star is considered a bookmark in the platform analytics experience, the same thing counts for performance analytics widgets might have created in the past. They are seen as just a different data source but it will be the same unified consistent data visualizations in the platform analytics experience so expect any widgets that were migrated into new data visualizations accessible through the data visualization library.
Dashboards
Platform Analytics Experience provides a unified experience for Dashboards. They can be accessed under:
- All > Self-Service > Dashboards
- Platform Analytics > Library > Dashboards
Dashboards form a big part of the Platform Analytics Experience. They provide a great way of consolidating visualizations together in a way that is relevant to a persona. Encouraging users to use this approach rather than static reports means more relevant and timely information is available to them.
Making decisions on stale information is never good.
Opening up a dashboard will show a range of indicators that can be drilled into
