ServiceNow Performance Analytics—Avoid data dystopia

If your data feels more like an apocalypse than a saving grace, it’s time for a transformation. Luckily, performance analytics is an excellent option for organizations looking to improve data management and reporting. By empowering leaders to identify the metrics that matter most for their objectives, analytics can help business leaders drive efficiency. From addressing common measurement and reporting issues to improving data-driven decision-making, investing in performance analytics has a direct and measurable impact on your organization.

Without a clear understanding of data analytics and a direct approach to comprehensive integration, it can be easy to confuse effective decision-making. In this blog, we’ll discuss the fundamentals of ServiceNow Performance Analytics, the benefits of the platform, and six best practices that will help you support real-time and historical data, connect metrics to your goals, and tell the story you need to tell with well-designed dashboards and visualizations.

An overview of ServiceNow Performance Analytics

ServiceNow Performance Analytics is a single system of record for collecting and analyzing data. It offers powerful analytics and reporting capabilities that empower organizations to measure, explore, and visualize metrics across their enterprises’ processes, applications, and modules.

Here are some of the most important capabilities offered by ServiceNow Performance Analytics.

Interactive dashboards

Executives and business owners need to be able to make quick decisions—and they need to be well informed if they want to improve business processes. With ServiceNow’s dashboards, business leaders can quickly access a comprehensive overview of performance trends, real-time results, and underlying operational records.

The platform’s intuitive navigation and drop-down menus and tabs make clear performance visualization easy. Most importantly, the dashboards provide business leaders and individuals across the company with access to a single source of truth.

One particularly powerful feature is the CIO Dashboard, which addresses a common pain point: the perception that IT is a "black box" that the rest of the business doesn't fully understand. This dashboard enables IT departments to showcase the value they deliver in real terms, helping to align IT initiatives with business objectives and building trust across the organization.

The platform’s intuitive navigation and drop-down menus and tabs make clear performance visualization easy. Most importantly, the dashboards provide business leaders and individuals across the company with access to a single source of truth.

Analytics Hub

With Analytics Hub, organizations can automatically track all objectives and metrics. The immersive studio enables business leaders to analyze, compare, and predict progress for every KPI based on historical and current data. Users can even access Analytics Hub at any time with mobile devices.

Robust analytics for all

Business leaders and end users alike can access real-time data that improves decision-making and increases efficiency in daily tasks. ServiceNow Performance Analytics offers text analytics that extracts trends from freeform data fields, thresholds that automatically generate results, drill-down analyses that offer detailed data summaries, and workspaces that offer a clear database view and transparency across processes. These capabilities enable organizations to drive continuous improvement, improve employee experiences, and deliver excellent customer service.

Out-of-the-box KPIs

One of the best parts about ServiceNow Performance Analytics is that it makes it easy to prove value quickly. For example, the platform offers 600 native key performance indicators (KPIs) for major processes, which means teams can save time on developing and maintaining their analytics solution. You’ll see an immediate difference in the previous state of your data in comparison to how your team can access it now.
With these key features, organizations can excel at achieving their goals by gaining valuable insights into their operations, tracking performance trends, and making data-driven decisions that improve processes throughout the company.

The benefits of ServiceNow Performance Analytics

The data-driven insights offered by ServiceNow Performance Analytics can empower organizations to achieve significant benefits—even as the business climate becomes more competitive. Here are some of the most influential benefits of the platform.

1. Prioritize resources

Clear data insights allow you to see everything you need to know about your current service coverage, enabling you to quickly adjust resources where they’re needed.

2. Invest in continual service improvement

Because Analytics Hub offers easy trackability for all KPIs, you can identify opportunities for service progress and innovation. Leadership can also back up all decisions with powerful insights. The truth is in the data.

3. Maximize automation

Do you want to improve efficiency with automation but aren’t sure where to start? Performance analytics can help you easily identify areas that automation can optimize, empowering you to reduce costs and streamline everyday operations.

4. Offer self-service for improved user experiences

Alongside automation, identifying areas for improvement can empower you to find opportunities for self-service within your workflows. As a result, you can streamline customer service management (CSM), improve user satisfaction with seamless service delivery, reduce the workload on data collection jobs and support teams, and increase operational efficiency.

5. Predict trends and identify potential problems

Assessing historical data doesn’t only offer insights into your past and current performance—it can also help you look ahead. Continuously detect potential bottlenecks before they interrupt operations and watch for ways you can improve.

6. Rely on secure data and scalability

ServiceNow Performance Analytics also offers automatic security and scalability. First of all, the Now Platform provides robust security measures to protect data stored within its platform, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability. And as data volumes grow, ServiceNow Performance Analytics is designed to scale and handle complex aggregation. Even with increased data sources and peak usage periods, ServiceNow allows for efficient data distribution across servers.

With Performance Analytics, you can turn your organization into a goal-oriented business. Rely on its intuitive capabilities to gain valuable insights and deliver better services.

Build an analytics culture that prioritizes learning

Now that you know just how powerful platform analytics is, let’s explore best practices for how you can maximize your use of the tool. First, before implementing ServiceNow Performance Analytics, take the time to build a culture that not only understands the value of data analytics but also promotes learning. This will help you improve throughout the process to leverage data-driven insights to their fullest capacity. It will also allow you to drive a trickle-down effect throughout your organization, impacting every team member across the organization—from data collector to CEO.

The first step to building an analytics-focused environment that prioritizes learning is to ensure that your leaders are committed to promoting learning and active participation from all users throughout the process. Then, help them teach employees about how analytics will improve their daily tasks and drive better business outcomes. Foster collaboration, provide training programs, and celebrate individuals that actively engage in learning and analytics. When you have a solid foundation that recognizes the value of performance analytics and embraces change, you’ll be better equipped to succeed—especially long term.

Use out-of-the-box content

You don’t need to start from scratch: The ServiceNow platform offers a variety of out-of-the-box capabilities that can be leveraged to avoid data chaos and promote responsible practices. Take advantage of them. For example, ServiceNow Performance Analytics offers modules that promote data collection, privacy, and protection; data governance and risk management; and reporting. While capabilities will vary depending on your ServiceNow release version, every instance comes with complementary ServiceNow Performance Analytics for Incident Management.

Using out-of-the-box content also allows organizations to avoid excessive and unsustainable customization and limit it to clear business needs that will maximize results. Your dashboards and breakdowns don’t need to be perfectly personalized before you start utilizing ServiceNow Performance Analytics; in fact, it will be an ongoing process that improves over time. So, don’t spend all of your planning time perfectly tuning your platform. Instead, allow for time to regularly review KPIs to make sure you’re consistently on the right track.

Introduce performance analytics in stages

Along those lines, it can be especially helpful to implement performance analytics in stages rather than pushing everything live at once. By introducing the practice in steps, you can ensure a smooth implementation and comprehensive adoption of the capability throughout the organization, as well as address challenges and gather feedback before investing all available resources into it.

First, prioritize the areas of processes that will benefit most from performance analytics and data insights, then select a few KPIs or metrics to start with. These could be areas that have a significant impact on the way your business runs, or they could be those that often create pain points for your team. After you identify priorities, break them down into a phased approach that allows you to review feedback and add functionality based on your needs. This approach will not only minimize the risk of overwhelming users with too much complexity or information but also ensure that your investments are actually offering the benefits you expect.

Measure leading and lagging indicators

As we’ve mentioned, KPIs are essential to know how well your implementation is performing. With performance analytics, you must monitor and measure both lagging indicators and leading indicators. Lagging indicators are used to determine the success of past performance; however, it can be difficult to influence them on a daily basis. This is what makes leading indicators so important to watch: While they may be more difficult to identify, they measure actions that will ultimately influence lagging indicators and showcase the results of your hard work. (Tip: Time series widgets can help you monitor your performance indicators over time).

Here’s an example: Let’s say your key goal is to reduce your mean time to issue resolution. This is your lagging indicator. While you won’t have insights into your issue resolution as a whole until you look at historical data a week or month later, ServiceNow Performance Analytics will allow you to track the leading indicators of this goal throughout the process. In this example, this could mean looking at the percentage of incidents that aren’t resolved in two days.

When you measure formula indicators, you can track progress in real-time, allowing you to exert more control over your performance overall. Best of all, measuring these indicators doesn’t need to be challenging. With the ServiceNow Utah release, you can use automated indicators to automatically calculate scores on a set of records from a table. You can also automatically generate email notifications with updates about any changes in indicator scores, ensuring you’re always up to date.

Focusing on leading and lagging indicators—especially when you have so much data to analyze all the time—will help you consistently improve your processes with performance analytics.

Have a conversation with your data

It’s not enough to simply collect and sort your data: You also need to explore, question, and extract insights from it. This will enable you to uncover patterns, trends, and relationships and deeply understand the information available to you. Identify the main questions you have about your performance, and make sure that you have quality data that answers the questions you have. Dive into your data with an open mind and allow yourself to discover relationships that may not have been apparent before.

Remember, while ServiceNow Performance Analytics can help you derive value from your data, it can’t provide insights where it doesn’t exist. This is why it’s so important to communicate with your data to ensure that it’s offering you the information you’re looking for. Ask questions, look for solutions, and provide feedback continuously. When you can ensure data quality and engage in it, you can drive maximum value from the tool.

Take time to explore, improve, and customize

Dialing in performance analytics and deriving valuable insights takes time, and it will be an ongoing process. So, don’t forget to plan for the time you’ll need to evolve as end users adopt the tool and your business goals change. Give yourself the freedom to explore data and uncover insights throughout the process. You won’t notice everything of value immediately. Test filters, segmentation, and visualizations to uncover interesting insights. Be curious and let the data guide you.

Exploration will also give you the opportunity to improve. Continuous improvement is key to refining your data processes well into the future. So, take the time to review your data processes and seek feedback from stakeholders and users to identify areas of inefficiency. Utilize automation and rely on industry expertise to gain deeper insights. The better you know your data, the easier it will be to not only find areas of improvement but also enhance them.

Finally, customization enables you to tailor your approach to your specific needs. Use the knowledge you’ve built to build custom data analysis frameworks, dashboards, and visualizations that align with your unique goals and needs. When you give room for you and your team to grow, there will be no end to the success you see—not only with ServiceNow Performance Analytics but your organization as a whole.

How we can help

Performance analytics is a game-changer for organizations seeking to leverage their data into actionable, meaningful insights. By dissecting patterns, trends, and relationships, organizations can not only make accurate forecasts based on historical data but also continuously improve their services. Yet, the true potential of this powerful tool can only be unlocked with the right expertise and ongoing support.

As an Elite ServiceNow Partner that serves in many geographies with a variety of verticals, Cask helps guide and empower organizations to achieve their business outcomes through strategic digital transformation.

With success stories from clients in multiple industries—including the public sector, healthcare, manufacturing, and more—Cask is a service provider that specializes in everything there is to know about ServiceNow practice in IT service management (ITSM), IT operations management (ITOM), customer experience, employee experience, app development, and more.

Learn more about finding the best ServiceNow Partner for your business needs.