ServiceNow What Techies Make of the Tech (3)

Whether you’re providing IT Service Management, HR Service Management or Customer Service Management,  ServiceNow’s – Now Platform, can be perfect for supporting your processes and services.

Delivering services is one thing, but measuring and improving them is a completely different story.

This short series of articles 'What Techies Make of the Tech' will be brought to a close by Michal, who will be looking specifically at this aspect through Performance Analytics.

Michal is an experienced Developer, who has a keen interest in IT and Business Management, including integrations between systems and process automation.

Michal has worked on a variety of interesting projects since starting his career with SPOC. His highlights would include:

• A Reporting and Productivity Application
• An Automatic Interview Scheduling Application
• Custom Service Portals
• Custom Applications

Session With Michal

There are many aspects of ServiceNow which I like but… having seen the articles of Tomasz and Igor, I’m taking a different approach.

I’m putting all my focus on one –  Performance Analytics.

Performance Analytics in ServiceNow helps Businesses gain insight into the services that are being delivered.  Such as Incident Management for ITSM.

The traditional approach to this was for Businesses to collect lots of information, compile it together and format it into tables and graphs, in a solution such as Excel.

This approach is time-consuming, labour intensive and rather frustrating. Worst of all, by the time the reports can be read, they’re often out of date and perhaps useless.

Producing reports in this way doesn’t allow the Business to get real-time insights and it’s very tricky to track but even harder to forecast.

Using Performance Analytics on ServiceNow

PA allows users to automate this process, bringing together daily trends rather than the static monthly reports.

These include real-time actionable insights relating to Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) which have previously been set.

This is approach is very powerful as rather than having to react on a month by month basis, you can take smaller daily actions.

Smaller, daily actions allow you to better predict what’s going to happen and allows tighter control measures to be used.

Think about driving a car along a long straight road. If you move the steering wheel to the left by 1cm and wait for 30 minutes, your course is going to change… dramatically!

If you move it by 1cm and adjust after 30 seconds, the course you will take will not alter much and it would be much easier to correct the path.

PA complements the existing reporting functionality in SN and is a very powerful way for Businesses to better control Service Delivery.

Reports are great as they provide a snapshot of a situation. You can think of PA as giving numerous snapshots over time, thus creating a ‘rich picture’ of data. When you record data in this way, you get the clear indication of trends.

Main Features of Performance Analytics –

KPI’s

The ‘indicators’ which we can use to determine the success of a service. I.E – Incidents

Number of Incidents, Number of new, Number of resolved etc..

There are KPI’s (many of them) which come pre-set out-of-the-box.

Scorecards

These provide an overview and ‘score’ for the selected KPI’s in a given category.

In ServiceNow, you can easily change the scorecard in a number of ways. This means you can focus on what’s going well, the areas which need improvement etc…

Each scorecard can be entered further and you’re able to set goals and targets for specific measurements. I.E The number of incidents opened in the last 24 hours.

As you drill down further, you’re able to review the information from different times. It’s also possible to look at other subcategories.

With our example of incidents, we could view these by priority, state, age etc.

This helps with Problem Management and finding the Root Cause Analysis of a problem.

Widgets

Simply the way that the information is presented on the dashboard such as a list, score or time series.

Dashboards

The dashboards include a series of indicators in one page so at a glance you can view what’s going on across a number of KPI’s.

I.e Number of incidents, incidents by priority, average open time etc…

You can bring together different measurements from the widgets for an interesting visualisation.

In Summary

Using PA allows businesses to really understand and control their Service Delivery. If you don’t measure it you can control it!

As ServiceNow already holds this information, you are able to get actionable insights across all your processes and services.

SPOC

An accredited ServiceNow Partner who has been working with the platform since 2010, SPOC is able to assist clients with a full range of services relating to the implementation of the ServiceNow platform, or improvements to existing solutions that have previously been delivered by other companies – Get In Touch