Many organisations and practitioners visit the SITS – The Service Desk & IT Support Show show to look at replacing ITSM tools.
Over the years at SITS, and when working with clients on procurement, one of the biggest challenges regularly mentioned is around ‘getting decent reporting out’ of these tools.
This reflects a number of issues that many organisations have, namely;
- The organisation’s ability to get suitable data and reports out of their tools.
- The capability of the tools to provide this data – and to be flexible to modifications and bespoke specifications.
Whilst there are variances in the levels and flexibility of the tools in the marketplace, there are additional questions for service providers / organisations that I have also found to be relevant:
- Are you clear on what reports and analysis you wish to produce?
- How do you manage the quality and governance around input data?
- Have you designed your current system to ensure that suitable data is output?
- Are your metrics related to a strategic view of your services?
- Does this design include e.g. input logging, workflows and closing/causal categorisation? for data capture?
- Have you engaged within your users/customers to identify what would be useful dashboards and outputs?
- Have you considered using combined/bundled reporting where several metrics are combined and weighted – e.g. as a balanced scorecard for greater insight?
- Have you designed suitable presentation formats to present and report on your service performance and experience?
Many tools have provided out-of-the-box reports although these usually require a lot of work to produce valuable data.
Many organisations now simply use external tools to produce analysis from a disparate number of sources – ITSM data, telephony, survey feedback, NPS, digital experience tools etc.
The key challenge – to produce good and valuable metrics – is in planning the expected outputs, as well as building in the necessary steps to ensure that the correct type of data comes out. So, good governance of processes and logging, updating/closing practice, clear use of suitable fields and good QA, are just as important as finding tools that will deliver this for you.
Certainly, a good vendor should be ready to help you to build the right approach to creating good metrics, usually based around a good catalogue or definition of services…
If you’d like to discuss this or any other relevant ITSM topics, please drop by our stand (124) at the SITS show next week.
