Posts Tagged ‘self service’

Self Service Reporting!

April 20th, 2010

Working on our new web site really triggered me to focus hard on the benefits of SMI Suite, our reporting solution for HP Service Manager/ServiceCenter.

Our main goal with the new site is to make sure that the home page immediately makes clear what SMI Suite does and how it will help our customers. Result of three months of brainstorming and editing is the following intro block that will be prominent on our home page:

Westbury’s SMI suite is the self service reporting solution for HP Service Manager

Do you like it? Is it unambiguous?

The main benefit to extract from this sentence is “self service reporting”. SMI Suite will put the power of reporting in the hands of the power users, the ones really in need of the reports. With SMI suite there is no dependency on internal or external BI specialists, no need for technical, scripting knowledge or endless sessions explaining the reporting requirements to whoever will create them for you. SMI suite will do all the heavy lifting of extracting the data from the HP SM database for you and load it into our own SMI database. The Business Objects layer we created on top of our SMI DB will allow you  – by just dragging and dropping the objects  – to build your reports and distribute them to those who requested them.

Check out our Test Drive to experience the ease of use of SMI suite yourselves: http://westbury-it.com/solutions/service-management-intelligence-suite/smi-suite-test-drive

The new web site will be up before the HP Universe in Washington DC this June. This means that we will have several more brainstorm and editing sessions over the content and the layout of the web site. Although it will probably never be perfect, the main objective is to be absolutely clear about what we are doing and how it will help our customers. Once the web site has been launched I will definitely check with you all if we have accomplished this goal.

Floris

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Why isn’t BI / reporting supporting your ITSM efforts?

February 18th, 2010

I read an interesting blog on complaints and potential reasons around BI/reporting in the organization.

10 meanings of why-my-BI-application-is-not-useful
By Boris Evelson

Which complaints and/or reasons are (most) applicable to you, your organization or your customers?

An overview from the blog with an ITSM perspective:

1. The data is not there, because

  • It’s not in the HP service management application (e.g. HP Service Manager)
The data is there, but
2. It’s not usable as is, because
  • The data is of poor quality (e.g. out of date, inconsistent or not complete)
3. I can’t find it, because I
  • Can’t find the right report
  • Can’t find the right metadata
  • Can’t find the data
  • I don’t have access rights to the data I am looking for
4. I don’t know how to use my application, because I
  • Was not trained
  • Was trained, but the application is not intuitive, user friendly enough
  • Need extensive knowledge of the underlying HP database structure
  • Need SQL knowledge to create reports
5. I can’t/don’t have time do it myself and
  • I don’t have support staff
  • I am low on BI priority list
6. It takes too long to
  • Create a report/query
  • Run/execute a report/query
7. I need to report/analyze on something that SQL can’t do, such as
  • Faceted search
  • SQL on data with uneven, unbalanced, ragged, recursive hierarchies
8. I don’t know what I am looking for, but my application is asking to
  • Run a specific report
  • Pick specific facts and dimensions

And 2 additional ones that  I added

9. I want do it myself but
  • My application doesn’t provide self service reporting capabilities
  • My organization doesn’t allow self service reporting
10. I don’t want to do BI, I want to run my business and expect
  • My application to present helpful information not just present data

Let me know what you think!

David vH

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