Monthly Archives: November 2021

You Have the Data: What’s Stopping You?

Posted on by

Your organization has spent the time and energy to define processes, configure platforms, and you’ve finally got a wealth of ITSM data. Now it’s time to turn that data into insight. What’s in your way?

Sadly, this is all too common: limitations of technology and implementation turning a rich pool of data into something fragmented and unusable. Your data is collected by systems that are optimized for workflow transactions and are not organized for easy analytical processing.

Fortunately, there’s a solution! We’re going to walk through some common barriers that get between your data and insights, and how the powerful flexibility of Explore Analytics knocks those barriers down!

Islands of Data

Islands of data exist at two levels: within your applications and between your applications.

Within your applications, data can be scattered across multiple tables. In this example, reporting on ServiceNow projects, data is scattered across Projects, Project Tasks, Time Cards, Resource Allocations, Issues, Risks, and more:

In addition to the islands within ServiceNow, there’s more data that could enrich and deepen your insights that are outside of the application:

Today, attempting to bridge these islands may involve complicated database manipulation, scripted web service integrations, bulk scheduled migrating of data—and still not result in the reports you want!

Instead, Explore Analytics connects to the data where it currently resides – connecting directly to the tools that currently have the data and discovering all of the relevant tables and fields:

The agility of this quick set-up process is powerful – one organization connected to seven real-time sources of data within one month, containing hundreds of tables and fields. Once the data sources are connected, a few clicks allow you to mash-up the data across the tables in one report!

Here’s an example of a dashboard combining data from ServiceNow (across multiple tables), a call system, a chat system, and a call queueing system – all real-time, no code required:

Making the Data Shine

Connecting to the data is only half the battle. The other half of the battle is presenting the data in an easy to use, consumable format that easily attracts the viewer to the information you want to present. Sadly, too often you are restricted from being able to build those reports based on limitations of in-app reporting.

With Explore Analytics, you can mashup data from multiple tables and applications to seamlessly analyze it as easily as if it were all in one data set. Moreover, you have full flexibility to present the data in many ways to ensure that the viewer can see insights in the most powerful, flexible format.

For example, here’s a multi-level pivot with multiple dimensions of data, showing the year-over-year the number of incidents in each quarter, and % differences between those quarters. Some quick coloring rules and calculations highlight the data in a way that a simple bar chart showing the number of incidents wouldn’t be able to show:

This can also be done with calculations that turn the raw data into something easy for stakeholders to read. The following report buckets project tasks into “on time,” “minor delay,” and “major delay.” Under the cover, raw date-time stamps are converted into a duration, then bucketed based on those durations – all using easy codeless formulas. The result is a report that hides the complexity from the viewer unless they want to drill into the details:

Conclusion

As you’ve seen, even if you already have the data, you might be blocked from getting the full insights of the data because of the limitations of your toolset. You need a flexible reporting platform that allows you the ability to easily connect to the data, and easily transform the raw data into appealing outputs consumable by business users.

Try Explore Analytics today to experience the powerful flexibility, and within minutes you’ll be getting insight out of your islands of data!

Start Making Agile Decisions Today

Posted on by

What is Agile Decision-Making?

The Agile approach shifted project management towards a responsive and iterative strategy. Too often, however, the traditional decision-making processes are rooted in the old top-down approach: a quarterly PowerPoint presentation, analytics projects, long wait times to get answers to questions.

Agile decision-making is about applying the same responsive and iterative strategy to your decision-making and backing the decision making with agile reporting and analytics. Key decision-makers need the power to get real-time information quickly, ask follow-up questions, and dive deeper into the data.

Ask yourself: if a decision-maker is looking at my data and has a question: what happens next? Can they get the answer while looking at the data with a few clicks? Or do they need to file another “report request?”

If the answer is the latter, here are some powerful tools you can bring to the table to empower yourself and your decision-makers to make agile decisions:

Responsive Power through Interactive Controls

If you’re providing reports to decision-makers, you can maximize the value of each individual report simply by ensuring that a rich set of interactive controls are enabled and ready for use!

Even the most frequently used report can be enriched with some powerful controls – take a look at this report showing a timeline of Incidents Opened, Resolved, and Backlog.

Try interacting by:

  • Dragging and dropping across the timeline to filter on a set of time
  • Dragging and dropping the timeline bar at the bottom to change the set of time
  • Click on “Backlog” in the legend and select “Hide”
  • Click the “Chart Settings” at the top and:
    • Change the “Range”
    • Change the type of chart
    • Turn the “Values” on and off

Instead of building the same reports in ten different ways to appease ten different stakeholders, let them focus in on the span of time and presentation they need for the question they’re answering in the moment! 

Another example below shows how interactive dashboards can add even more interactive controls! Here are some things to try with the interactive dashboard:

  • Select “Green IT Initiative” from the “Portfolio” slicer to see how a decision-maker can quickly focus in on the data they want
  • In the list of project, click the project name “Cloud Health” to see how a decision-maker can quickly dive into another tab with more detailed information on how money has been spent in this project so far.

Users who are logged in can also drill-down to more specific reports or drill-through to the details:

Rapid Iterations with Self-Service Reporting

You may be used to building reports for stakeholders who only passively consume the reports. But an agile decision-making process ideally allows everyone in the process to rapidly iterate on the data.

Even if you create the initial starting point, allow stakeholders to easily iterate by providing easy and powerful self-service reporting – that way, they can have questions, try to answer them, and slowly develop more and more sophisticated reports.

Watch the following to see how in a few clicks, we can go from the simplest report to a rich, multilayer pivot with interactive controls:

The Most Important Part of Agile: Just Get Started!

The key with agile is to get started and keep improving! Identify small, easy wins to start getting value in reporting. For example, is there a particularly important report that is currently generated as a flat PDF or complex-to-maintain Excel sheet? Take it on, replace it with an interactive dashboard, and you’re already getting value from the power of interactive, agile decision-making!