With the release of SMI 2011 any information stored in the HP Service Manager application can theoretically be made available for reporting.

In practice this means that although it is possible to extract all the data from HP Service Manager, the best practice will be to extract only the data required for reporting. After all,  from all the data stored in the HP Service Manager database only roughly 20 – 40% at most is real information that will help you during your day-to-day activities and allow you take maturity of your ITSM platform to the next level.

Let me throw you some numbers at you, based on HP’s Best Practices for HP Service Manager 9.x reporting, and the out-of-the-box HP Service Manager model:

Apart from the obvious support for the main ITSM processes (Incident Management, Interaction Management, Change Management, Request Management, Service Level Management, Problem Management, Configuration Management, Known Error Management, Knowledge Management) you will be able to report on all the supporting data like Operator, Contact, Location, Department, Assignment Group, Tasks, Clocks, Activities and many more as well, either in combination with the main ITSM processes or standalone.

Next to reporting on the available data from the HP Service Manager database, SMI 2011 also offers the possibility to enrich the data with additional computed data, for example duration calculations like first touch duration and Boolean calculations like the first line resolved indicator. In theory, any computation can be made, but again as a best practice you only want to perform calculations that facilitate easier reporting and do not want to perform for example your SLA or SLO calculations on this level, that should be done in the HP Service Manager application because you would want access to that data in the application as well.

Calculations, derived date objects like Year, Month Name, Week Nr, etc and pre-defined conditions for dates are all objects made available for easier and more standardized reporting. They enrich the service management semantic reporting layer (also known as a universe) and facilitate the self service reporting capabilities of SMI 2011. Users without in-depth technical knowledge or knowledge of the HP Service Manager data model are capable of building and tailoring the reports to meet their specific needs.