May 9, 2017 | Vincent Loffeld | Knowledge17
Today I went to a really useful session on Reporting. The Reporting 201: Advanced Reports and Dashboards presented by Dan Grady and Silvia Mihit. The fact that the session was completely sold out and had a waiting queue for no show fillers, said enough. Creating reports and dashboards in ServiceNow Istanbul release has gotten easier but the true question remains: do you really need thousands of reports in your organization? Or are we missing the point here?
When starting to build new reports always challenge the requestor and ask these three questions:
Because just having lots of reports or dashboards doesn’t make you a data driven organization. In fact, you are not unleashing the full potential of the platform and are losing time with doing things that do not make an impact. So, impact is important.
But how to define impact and when do reports make an impact? Well, impact is all about moving a metric or outcome. So, the report should influence the outcome. When looking at the report it should direct you into something that needs to be changed or updated or improved. Basically, it needs to change the behavior of the viewer. Another outcome could be that it initiates a new product or service, because the user saw something that was of interest to him.
The next question is why you should use the reporting capabilities of the platform instead of using an external tool. Basically, there are 3 reasons as to why. First; it is real-time. You can make fast decisions with confidence and do not have to wait for the data unload. Secondly; it is native, thus you can make smart, data driven actions based on reports that will always work. Thirdly; It is secure. If the first two reasons weren’t enough, this one should. Being able to use all security measures that you put in place to secure your data, the in-platform reports use these securities. Using the reports reduces the costs and risk that will be incurred when exporting data.
The reporting capabilities of ServiceNow are already of a high standard, but in the new releases a lot of improvements are on the roadmap. One of those include improved interactivity. Why create one report that just generates more questions than answers? Use the interactivity capabilities that will really blow your users mind and give them the tools to actually use the reports and filter options to deliver the questions that needs answering.https://plat4mation.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=11361&action=editSave
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