Stakeholder Usage — A Critical KPI for Analytics

[dangrady510]

Way back when, I bought my parents a DVD player for Christmas so they could move into the 21^st Century and stop using their archaic VCR.   That DVD player is still in the box. And if I asked them why they never took it out of the box, the response would be something along the lines of "the VCR still works".     Same thing happened with the cordless phone and, more recently, the iPad, the Kindle, and the Keurig.

I get it.   Change is hard.   And if it isn't broken, why fix it?

That mentality works for my parents. Unfortunately, in the business world we can't stand still. We have to evolve and find more efficient and effective ways to do things to stay competitive and grow the business.

It's why many of you have already invested in the ServiceNow platform—to get better.

The platform comes with a built-in analytics engine called Performance Analytics that helps provide the visibility and insight into where opportunities to improve exist.   Essentially, Performance Analytics gives you a better ServiceNow.

In order to take advantage of this capability, you have to first "take it out of the box"(here's how to enable the complimentary version of Performance Analytics), and second it has to be adopted by others in the organization.   Usage and stakeholder adoption rate are the key indicators of a successful deployment of any analytics solution.   The higher the adoption rate, the more people you have making more informed decisions, and in turn the greater the return you will get on your information assets.

Because Performance Analytics is an in-platform solution, it can achieve higher adoption rates by eliminating some of the barriers more traditional approaches face.

For example:

• My data is better than yours: Confidence in the data has historically been an adoption roadblock for many organizations.   With Performance Analytics, questions about the timeliness and accuracy of the data are removed because the data is in-platform and available immediately.   It hasn't been moved or manipulated to fit an external tool or one-off demand.   It's this movement and manipulation of data has always created silos of information.   The more silos, the cloudier the view into the business gets because the KPIs and metrics are not in alignment across the organization. Since the data isn't coming from a single source, there is no confidence or trust in the data.   The first 45 minutes of every meeting are now spent discussing whose numbers are correct?

• Not a dead end: Information is both contagious and addictive.   Once someone has a taste, they'll always want just a little bit more. One of the ways quickest ways to kill the adoption rates of a dashboard is to force people to go someplace else to ask and answer follow-up questions about something on said report or dashboard. Performance Analytics gives users both the ability to drilldown into any item on a dashboard to get additional information and the flexibility to slice the the data in different ways to ask and answer those inevitable follow up que....

• In the flow: Analytics support decision making.   The closer you can put the analytics to the point of decision; the higher your adoption rates will be.   People shouldn't have to leave the flow of their day-to-day lives to get access to the information they need to do their jobs.   Performance Analytics allows you to provide context sensitive information at the point of decision for all users of the platform whether you need an Executive Dashboard or if you're a frontline worker via In-Form Analytics.

• More than a better mouse trap: Many organizations invest in analytics solutions and then simply look to recreate the same reports they are using today. They then wonder why they aren't seeing movement to the new solution.   While Performance Analytics will allow you to more efficiently generate the same reports and dashboards your users are comfortable with, the solution also provides an out of the box infrastructure that gives you the foundation you need to provide more contextual information. This additional context in terms of time, process, and people gives you the insights you need to be more proactive as an organization.   It is important you leverage this foundation to provide incremental value to the business. Value drives adoption; if stakeholders think they are simply just getting more of the same, they will need to be forced to move to the new solution.

These are just some examples of how an in-platform solution like Performance Analytics eliminates some of the barriers to adoption that hinder more traditional approaches.

As for my parents?

They finally took the iPad out of the box and are now watching movies, downloading books, and Face Timing with my kids on a regular basis all from a single platform, I mean device.

They found the value.

Now if it could only make coffee.