Report and Dashboard governance

[SusanWinKY]

All of our ITIL users are able to create reports and dashboards.  Over time, as expected, we've accumulated quite a lot of reports.  We've been asked to put a governance process in place to deactivate reports and dashboards that are no longer needed. 

Has anyone implemented such a governance policy and would be willing to share your decision-making and implementation regarding this?

My initial thought is to set up a scheduled email that asks the owner of each report/dashboard if it's still needed, and provide two links (Yes | No).  Upon clicking No, the report or dashboard would be deactivated. 

Another thought is to automatically deactivate a report/dashboard whenever the owner/creator of it is deactivated, but then we run the risk of deactivating something that others may be using.  With the email method, we at least put the decision in the hands of the person who owns it.  We'd still have to figure out how to handle reports/dashboards that are owned by a deactivated user, but I think our team can manage that.

[Tracy Davis]

I've been considering doing something similar. I just created a table and report that shows dashboard usage - and now need to somehow turn that into a report that shows dashboards with NO usage in the prior 12 mos.

My plan is if not used in 12 mos to send notification to the owner and state if no reply by X date then the dashboard will be inactivated. You need to give them a deadline, otherwise they may not reply at all.

If the owner is deactivated, you could still look at usage. If people are using it, maybe try to identify a new owner?

This is the process I followed to create the usage report

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=19bdcd95dbb5ef001089e15b8a961937

[Xavier Cordero]

Hello Susan,

I would tackle this from a utilization perspective, which takes into consideration time, as well as amount of times each is viewed. ServiceNow provides a great way of tracking report utilization through the report_stats table, which indicates the last time a report was run, and how many times a report has been run (can be accessed through the Report Statistics Module as shown in the image at the bottom).

As it pertains to the Dashboards, I would go by https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=19bdcd95dbb5ef001089e15b8a961937 as was stated above, but I would be more concerned with reporting when the last time the dashboard was used vs the amount of times that it has been used. As such, I would use the thread as a base, but I would add 2 field to the dashboards table (pa_dashboards) which has for all dashboards when they were last viewed and the total views that they have. 

This way you're able to easily make decisions on the last time the dashboard was used, while preserving total usage. I would then look to sending automated emails through ServiceNow notifications that warn users of dashboard deletion when a dashboard has not been used within the last 90 days.

[SusanWinKY]

Tracy and Xavier, thanks for your input!  Once we finalize our process, I'll try to remember to update here what we implement.

There is a way to deactivate dashboards (yay) but no way to deactivate reports (boo).  I have seen other posts suggesting to assign it to a role that no one has or to a user that no one is actually associated with.  We'll most likely try one of those.

[Tracy Davis]

Thank you!

You can restrict report visibility to just the SN support/admin team. I've also used the Tag field to note as pending deletion.

This whole process should be easier to audit than this lol