If your IT service management (ITSM) tool is “average” in nature, then you might be experiencing many of the common issues that IT service desk personnel, in particular, have with their tools.

One of these is that the native reporting and analytics capabilities are limited. For example, in terms of flexibility, the data that can be accessed; and most importantly, the ability to gain valuable insights that could significantly improve service desk operations and outcomes.

It’s why SysAid added business intelligence (BI) capabilities to its advanced reporting and analytics capabilities. But more on this later. First, I need to call out the continuing reporting and analytics issues faced by IT service desks.

What improvements would you like to see in your ITSM tool?

If your thoughts are in line with Service Desk Institute (SDI) research data, then you might call out any or all of the top five ITSM tool frustrations:

1. Usability/functionality
2. Reporting
3. Features
4. Out of the box/development needs
5. Speed

Reporting was also the third most wanted improvement to ITSM tools (after automation/AI and self-service/chatbots) in the same report.

Surely this seems strange when ITSM solutions house so much IT-related data. Whether it be in a configuration management database/system (CMDB/CMS), a service catalog, or within the more-transactional records for incidents, service requests, problems, and changes.

It raises the question of how many IT organizations can currently use all of this data to better understand their past and to positively influence their present and future?

Your large portfolio of IT service desk metrics probably isn’t the insight you need

There’s a lot of operational insight already percolating out of ITSM tools. For example, incident trends for problem management purposes. Or the death-by-metrics approach to service desk performance reporting, where it can commonly take some poor soul a week to pull together a monthly reporting pack (which then, unfortunately, gets very little attention from stakeholders).

But beyond the number of incidents handled and the level of first contact resolution achieved, what else could the wealth of data trapped inside your ITSM tool be telling you and your business colleagues about the past and the future of your organization’s IT service delivery and support capabilities?

Why are you (and others) getting so little real insight from your ITSM tool?

Few people would argue against the saying that “good decisions are guided by good data” or the logic that great businesses are built on good decisions. So why aren’t we using more of the data trapped inside our ITSM tools for greater insight and better decision making?

Of course, there’s the perceived lack of reporting capabilities in ITSM tools that’s highlighted above. Or perhaps the cobbler’s children principle applies – with the IT organization too busy dealing with the reporting needs of other business functions to improve on its own. Or maybe we just don’t see the need, or aren’t made to see the need, for improvement and the data that would help to drive it.

Of these, and especially in these times where IT is being called upon to improve not only its own operations and outcomes but also those of other business functions, the most likely cause is that your average ITSM solution doesn’t give as much insight into the data it holds as it could.

Your current ITSM activities, and tool, would benefit from the use of BI

Think about what you could better see and achieve through easier, and more insightful, access to the data trapped within your ITSM tool. For example:

• A better understanding of how your IT ecosystem works in reality. For instance, being able to identify which service level targets can’t be (consistently) met, or conversely those that can never fail and are as such pretty useless as targets.
• Demonstrating how upping or lowering service levels will increase or decrease IT costs versus the resulting change in business performance. In the current climate, this could be an easy way to reduce IT costs with a minimal impact on business operations and outcomes.
• Using predictive analytics to understand the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data. For instance, that a currently met service level target is likely to be missed based on a repeating seasonal variation.
• Using ITSM data from the various ITSM tool ‘modules’ to create a real-world service taxonomy. This could be as part of a larger service portfolio management initiative that covers both IT and the other business functions that are using the ITSM tool as part of an enterprise service management strategy.
• Correlating service desk contact methods to issue type to understand how best to encourage and increase self-service adoption.
• Improving service desk efficiency and effectiveness – which could be as simple as refining the incident classification hierarchy or as complex as understanding “flow” across a number of common service desk scenarios.
• Improving the IT knowledge base and self-help facility, and consequently reducing the IT service desk workload while improving the employee experience.

Depending on the current scope of your organization’s ITSM capabilities, there are many other potential opportunities such as more accurate availability and capacity management decisions, reducing change risk, improving governance, reducing financial “wastage,” and improving customer satisfaction. Plus, there are probably also other opportunities to improve that you don’t even know exist (yet).

How SysAid can help

To help with all of the above potential improvement opportunities, SysAid’s BI Analytics, powered by Qlik®, is built into SysAid’s service desk. It gives IT service delivery and support teams a quick and easy way to access the data they need to better manage and improve upon both operations and outcomes. Ultimately, opening up the previously trapped data to inform better insights and decision making.

For those organizations using Microsoft’s Power BI, SysAid now offers an integration that allows you to regularly export your SysAid ticket data to OneDrive where you can display it in MS Power BI. And from there, you can build your own dashboards. This is available today on our Marketplace.

Hopefully, the above has highlighted the current limitations of ITSM tool reporting and analytics capabilities and how the use of a BI tool would help your organization. If you would like to find out more about the opportunities of BI for ITSM, then please contact us for a free consultation.