How to Improve Your Enterprise Reporting

Service and Support teams are the eyes and ears of IT. We see every outage, systemic failure, system issue or process breakdown first. Yet our KPIs and metrics often remain focused on operational metrics such as speed of answer, handle time and volume. While those things are important, they’re not that informative when it comes to making informed decisions. Leaders need clear, enterprise-wide visibility into issues and trends so they can address them proactively before they are escalated by business leadership.

The primary rule of good incident reporting is simple: IT leaders should never be blindsided by a call from a peer asking why an issue has not been fixed. Incident data should be well-organized into transparent views of trends and impact, so that leadership can identify problems early and take immediate action rather than being reactive to a customer escalation.

Why would this be something that’s handled by the Service and Support team? Because our teams have the best holistic view of the trends and impact of technology issues, and we can approach it without bias. The IT teams that receive escalations have a natural incentive to minimize or reframe significant problems drawing attention to a problem makes you the owner of that problem. That human-nature tendency is understandable, but continual soft-pedaling issues only kicks the can down the road, and when the problem finally blows up, it’s much more visible.

As support teams, we’re the closest to the customer’s pain. That data needs to be captured honestly and transparently reported. As a result, the organization gains a reliable early-warning system.

What good enterprise reporting looks like

Enterprise reporting must be grounded in solid data and is free of bias and editorializing. Even the perception of bias destroys credibility. Stick to numbers: counts, trends, severity and impact. The numbers and associated trends will speak for themselves. Don’t assign blame or soften uncomfortable facts. Focus on providing an accurate picture that leadership can use to make good decisions.

Effective reporting should include:

• Consistent categorization of systemic incidents
• Clear severity and impact
• Trending that shows if issues are growing, shrinking, or stable
• A clear link between incidents and the workgroups, systems, or processes involved
• Brief summaries that draw attention to systemic issues

5 ways to improve your reporting

Here are a few things you can try:

Work with leadership to define what should be elevated. The focus would be on high-volume, high-severity incidents or those requiring significant effort to resolve.

Drive consistency within your service desk team and improve incident categorization to ensure consistent reporting. If there’s consistency in identifying the product, failure type and related systems, it makes analysis more objective and reduces subjective interpretation.

Reporting should be quick and easy to create and share. Avoid spending too much time collating data or creating spreadsheets. Focus on providing a clear, concise summary that highlights recurring issues, trends and incidents awaiting root cause analysis. Provide this at whatever cadence leadership desires. Work with your leadership to determine what they consider most important and focus on that as you build reports or dashboards. A simple report clearly supported by data is more valuable than complex dashboards.

If you have the budget and tools already in place, strengthen the capabilities of your existing systems. Use analytics to identify trends and patterns, and provide leadership with data-centric, summarized views, while retaining the details within the support team as a resource to answer any questions that may arise.

If budgets are tight or tools are limited, focus on building scheduled reports for the most frequent incident types and trends. Stick to the facts, like volumes, trend direction and impacted areas.

Support teams usually know what’s going wrong.  A data-first approach to reporting allows our leadership to stay ahead of problems instead of explaining them after the fact.