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Tom Pacyk
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

When we talk to our customers about Performance Analytics, we naturally hear questions about why they wouldn’t use their existing BI solution — tools like Tableau or Microsoft Power BI — which is often licensed across the entire enterprise and considered an internal standard for any reporting needs.

Those two traditional BI products (and many more) are well-designed reporting and analytics tools, built to meet a wide variety of use cases. While it’s technically possible to use these third-party tools to report on ServiceNow business performance, you should consider the advantages of an in-platform solution like Performance Analytics before attempting to use a general-purpose reporting tool for your ServiceNow data. We’ll walk through five of the top advantages in more detail throughout the rest of this article:

Out-of-the-Box Best Practice Content

If you’re interested in measuring your business or process performance, you likely want to get started as soon as possible. You want to immediately know where you are, how you’ve been trending, and then be able to slice the data in different ways to help you understand those results. Performance Analytics ships with Content Packs — collections of prebuilt KPIs, breakdowns, widgets, and dashboards that are precisely tuned— for IT, Customer Service Management, Human Resources, and Security Operations, allowing you to get started with just a few clicks.

As of the Kingston release, Performance Analytics includes over 500 best practice KPIs for measuring all of your processes. You could spend time researching, defining, building, and testing each of these formulas for use in another platform, but we’ve already done the hard work to provide you with the most common indicators of process and business health. We also update the content packs with each release, so you get continuous value.

After configuring a KPI, the next question is usually going to be how you can drill down or explore that data to understand the composition of the result. Performance Analytics ships with the most common breakdowns already configured, and you can easily add new ones for additional ways to slice your data. There’s no need to extract additional table data or manually build relationships between different tables because the platform already understands these connections, and there’s no chance of making mistakes in an ETL (extract, transform, load) process when using an in-platform solution. Many ETL mistakes go unnoticed for a period of time and mislead users until corrected, but using Performance Analytics helps maintain data integrity and accuracy.

Finally, we’re at the point of exposing those KPIs and breakdowns to an audience. Performance Analytics Content Packs include preconfigured dashboards that we’ve created and tuned based on customer feedback, allowing you to start looking at your performance instead of starting from a blank sheet of (digital) paper.

A common request from executive or senior management is to get a holistic view of performance across multiple processes or business functions, and this is where Performance Analytics really shines. It’s one thing to build a dashboard that displays statistics about your incidents and trends, but it’s another to start visualizing how incidents are related to other ITSM processes like change and problem management. And it’s a few more levels up to start showing how your ITSM performance impacts customer satisfaction and project costs on an executive dashboard. The content packs include dashboards tailored towards different personas and stakeholders, so everyone gets a lens into the data that makes sense for their role.

Be sure to consider the time, resource, and cost savings the out-of-the-box content packs will provide over manually creating, managing, and refining your own reports.

Self-Service Analysis for Everyone

Performance Analytics complements the out-of-the-box content by empowering process and service owners with self-service tools for understanding results. The Detailed Scorecard provides a location where users can explore their performance by filtering dates, changing time series aggregations, forecasting predicted scores, and adjusting the visualization types without impacting a dashboard.

For example, changing the time series aggregation from a monthly average to a rolling 30 day or weekly average would typically require an analyst to build a complex report with different slicers and calculations for each desired interval. Users can quickly select an alternate aggregation interval — an out-of-the-box feature with Performance Analytics — from a dropdown field on the Detailed Scorecard without involving the BI or IT team.

Forecasts of future scores can be toggled on or off, and common statistical summaries like sum, average, median, maximums, and minimums are automatically displayed for the selected date range. Workbench widgets allow users to get an end-to-end view of their process and explore each step without building multiple reports. Putting these features at the fingertips of service owners allows them to quickly and easily answer questions in a self-service manner, and prevents report sprawl where tens or hundreds of nearly-identical reports are created.

Almost every BI tool provides self-service capabilities for exploring published models, but there is an entirely different skill set required in order to adjust the underlying KPIs and reports. A common theme we see with enterprise tools is that an initial set of KPIs and dashboards will be built by a BI or IT team, but as those teams shift focus to the next project it becomes difficult to update and change what was delivered. Service management is a highly dynamic process that is continuously changing, and users have ever-increasing expectations that must be met. Performance Analytics empowers service owners to quickly answer questions and then take corrective action in a self-service manner.

A major advantage of using Performance Analytics as an in-platform solution is that the configuration follows your instance, even when patching or upgrading. Adding a new category or assignment group to existing forms doesn’t require anyone to update a database import script, add a row to an Excel table of slicers, or change the dashboard filters — those additions are automatically detected and immediately visible within Performance Analytics. You’ll want to consider the effort required to establish and maintain an ETL process that provides the same level of flexibility before committing to an external tool.

Embedded Analytics (with Context!)

Another dimension to consider is how embedded analytics can enhance your service delivery. Providing analytics within an existing workstream is a proven way to realize more value because your workers can see this data within the context of their work and adjust behavior without jumping between screens or applications.

Take this quote from Nucleus Research for example:

In the next 5 years, […] 90% of analytics solutions for business users will be embedded in other core applications. […] embedded analytics will evolve so that business users are leveraging analytics at least once per day without realizing it.

Your teams are already living in ServiceNow to get their work done, so forcing them to jump to another application for data will result in one of two outcomes:

  • Lost time as they switch between applications and reports to answer questions 
  • KPIs and dashboards will go unused because they live outside of the current context

In-form analytics allows you to embed dashboard widgets within existing ServiceNow forms, enabling workers to answer questions without switching screens or applications. Imagine your staff being able to provide the latest expected resolution time for a specific category or assignment group while looking at the incident form — that information is top of mind for anyone submitting an incident or case, and presents a significant advantage. Or better yet, what if you could see exactly which skilled resources for a category or team have availability to assist with the current case?

And Spotlight is a game changer because you can assign each record a Spotlight score — a customizable weighted value that accounts for an incident’s duration, number of reassignments, user impact, SLA, or more — to help front-line workers prioritize the work that is most important to the business. Lists with Spotlight scores can be embedded within the dashboards provided to working teams, so they know exactly where they should focus their time, all without having to switch out of an existing workstream.

Text analytics allows you to study the patterns and trends emerging from unstructured text fields directly within the platform. You can see how different words and phrases are trending over time to proactively head off problems or identify gaps in knowledge articles. There’s also no need to export large amounts of unstructured data outside of the platform because this analysis is performed alongside the existing Performance Analytics collection jobs.

Real-Time Visibility

Performance Analytics data is available in real time so front-line workers, service owners, and executives know exactly where they stand and how they are trending at any given time.

A traditional analytics approach is to collect data and calculate results on a regular basis — maybe daily, weekly, or monthly through an ETL process, but monthly and weekly reports are very retrospective and often arrive too late to help change a direction. There may have a significant spike or drop since the last data refresh and the report audience won’t have any visibility into those shifts until the next time they view the report, which could be days or weeks away. In some cases the spike won’t ever appear on a report because it occurred between two snapshots, and the business has no idea that service was negatively impacted for a period of time.

Daily snapshots with third-party tools may be possible based on the volume of data and CPU available, but even that approach can leave you blind to an important event for up to one day. Performing data refreshes hourly or every few hours is possible, but might be cost prohibitive based on the amount of data. Just think: you wouldn’t tolerate your bank to give you a snapshot of your account balance that is a week or month old, right? You should have a real-time pulse on your business the same way you have real-time visibility into your bank account at any time.

Performance Analytics can provide a balance here with real-time visibility into the metrics that require a continuous pulse and daily scheduled jobs for your supporting KPIs. This balance of real-time data and snapshotting makes your performance more transparent and allows you to react quickly when adjustments are needed. There’s also no need to scale out with additional infrastructure or cloud subscription resources because Performance Analytics runs within the ServiceNow cloud.

Security and Data Protection at Scale

The last (although certainly not least important!) major advantage of using an in-platform analytics solution is that your data always remains within the ServiceNow cloud infrastructure and is governed by the same controls detailed in the ServiceNow Trust & Compliance Center. There are no data connectors required to download and refresh scores, and your ServiceNow platform data is never transferred on-premises or to another cloud platform. You’re able to tap into the advantages of the Now platform availability and scale instead of worrying about purchasing and managing reporting infrastructure.

Granular access to dashboards is applied using existing ServiceNow roles or groups, and those same controls extend to the underlying record data. With a third-party solution you’ll need to manage dashboard and report access separately, and somehow keep those controls in sync with the ServiceNow permissions as roles, users, and groups change. In-platform dashboards also allow you to see and access the individual records associated with a KPI because the existing ACLs (access control lists) automatically apply with Performance Analytics. If you identify an issue on a score or a chart you can drill directly to the record and take action to resolve the problem. While not impossible, achieving this same functionality would require using row-level security features to expose the correct the amount of record data to each unique role, and the risk of misconfiguration could be costly.

Drive Toward Continual Service Improvement

Performance Analytics doesn’t just tell you how you’re doing — it’s prescriptive, meaning you’ll get help identifying the best candidates for automation, recognizing where you have gaps in knowledge management, and understanding where to focus in order to meet service commitments.

The advantages covered here are just a sample of the value Performance Analytics provides by being a native, secure, and real-time solution for the ServiceNow platform. The out-of-the-box content kickstarts your analytics journey, the self-service and real-time capabilities allow you to truly understand your operations, and the ability to embed analytics within the existing context helps everyone deliver better results. All of this is provided with the scale and security of the ServiceNow Nonstop Cloud, so you have peace of mind that your operational data is always available and protected.

Performance Analytics is truly for everyone in the organization — executives, service owners, process owners, and front-line workers can all use a single solution to make better decisions and focus on improving service delivery.

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