To Maximize the Value of your Data - Have a Conversation With It

[dangrady510]

"Dad, why can't I eat all of the Halloween candy today?"

"Because — you'll get a stomach ache and it's bad for your teeth."

"Why, Dad?"

"Because the candy is full of sugar and sugar is bad for your teeth"

"Why?"

"Because."

"But why?"

"Just because."

Sound familiar?   If you were ever a kid or a parent I'm sure you've experienced a back and forth very similar to this.   It's part of life.   It can be relentless and frustrating because at the end of these exchanges neither party is satisfied with the outcome.

I read a recent post on a parenting site that suggested the reason for this was that when children launch into a parade of "Why's" they aren't looking for a single answer.     What they are looking for is a conversation.   That each "Why" is actually a "That's interesting let's talk about it some more".

In many organizations the same thing happens when it comes to communicating business information. Stakeholders are often presented information via static reports or complicated spreadsheets that lead to more "why" questions with no straightforward way to ask and get answers to follow up questions - a very one sided approach to communicating information when what the stakeholder wants is a back and forth conversation.

ServiceNow's Performance Analytics provides a number of different ways to facilitate these data driven conversations.   One of the more effective ones is via a Workbench Widget.

A Workbench Widget allows you to bring together a collection of different indicators, create contextual relationships between them and present a potential conversation to the stakeholder via a single screen.

For example, let's look at this Workbench Widget that is focused on my current open incidents.

The number of open incidents is the blue area chart trending over time in the middle of the screen. It's showing me that I currently have 113 open incidents in Tier 1.

Across the top of the screen I am presented with how many open incidents we have in each of my different tiers.   I can use these to adjust the focus of my conversation — we'll do that in a bit.

Below the main open incident indicator, I have a number of contextual supporting indicators that help give me a better understanding of what was going on at the current point in time.

So in this case, I can see that the average age of the 113 open incidents in Tier 1 is 19.49 days (and unfortunately that is on the rise). The first call resolution rate is 75% and has dropped from yesterday, but 71% of them haven't been updated in 5 days, and 18 % haven't been updated in 30 days.

That's a good deal of contextual information about those 113 open incidents at that point in time communicated in a very concise fashion.

If I wanted to start a dialogue about how this information has changed over time I can simply move my mouse across the time period and everything will adjust to give me more complete answer.

Here's that same situation on March 31^st.

Let's keep talking about the 113 open incidents on April 20^th.   As we move down towards the bottom of the screen we start to see the information broken down even further.   In this case, we can see what priority each of these open incidents falls into.

If I only had the counts of the incidents everything would be looking good. The majority of my incidents are in the low and planning priorities with a small number of Criticals. However, the trend based information (or "microchart", for my visualization experts) on the Critical incidents is telling me that these 8 Critical incidents is a peak value for this most recent time period.

That's a pretty complete story being told in a single screen.

How about some interaction? Some dialogue with the data.

Let's ask about those 163 open incidents that are sitting in Tier 3.

Once I ask my question the workbench responds, but not just with the same indicators that I had for my Tier 1 incidents.   You'll notice that my supporting First Call Resolution Rate indicator has been replaced by the Average Reassignment Times (Count) for these Tier 3 incidents.     Makes sense — first call resolution rate would be out of context and out of place in a conversation about Tier 3 incidents. The Workbench presents us with contextually aware information that is relevant to the current conversation.

Every piece of information can lead to another question, another "what" or "why".

Let's answer some questions about the Reassignment Counts of these Tier 3 incidents — where are my opportunities to improve.

By focusing the conversation on the Average reassignment times I can see that my Critical and High incidents are being reassigned quite a bit — might be time to look at my SLAs and whether they are driving the proper behaviors or just having people play hot potato with these tickets.

Now let's talk about reassignments from a categorical perspective to see what's driving my reassignments and where my opportunities for improvement might be.

Looks like the Software category is well above average for the incidents in Tier 3.

Now we have some direction in terms of where to target our efforts from an education and knowledge perspective.

Just like with my children, these data driven conversations can take place about anything.

Resolution Cost

Events

Age

The difference between the conversations I have with my kids and the ones we have in the business world is that they can't end in "Just Because".

The dialogues need to result in actions that impact business outcomes.

Ask yourself is your organization ready, willing, and able to have these conversations?