Organizations Cannot Identify Business Trends or Issues with Their Traditional Reporting Methods

United Kingdom, June 09, 2010 – Axios Systems, the world’s leading provider of IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, including the assyst Service Desk solution, today reveals the results from a survey conducted during the last in its series of Service Catalog webcasts. It shows that while most organizations are running reports, they aren’t focusing on the key areas that will benefit the business by identifying issues or business trends.

Of the organizations surveyed during the webcast, 43 per cent do not schedule standard reports, but simply run these on an ad-hoc basis – this is an inconsistent and inaccurate method of reporting and will likely return results with little value that cannot be used to improve the services provided.

In addition to this, the majority of those surveyed (62 per cent) were found to be running standard or ad-hoc reports, mainly on traditional areas such as number of calls logged or number of changes requested, rather than on more strategic reports such as Cost, Demand and Service Level Management (SLM).

Managing the cost of services is essential to running a financially efficient IT service - it is therefore concerning that, of those surveyed, 67 per cent do not report on any Cost Management metrics. Only 6 per cent report on predicted costs and the same on costs per individual service. By enabling the identification of expenditure on IT services, organizations can reduce IT spend through establishing why services are being requested and can predict future request levels, leading to more accurate IT budgeting.

Demand Management reporting can provide organizations with a clear view of the demand level against services, which can be used to predict requirements for following periods, allowing improved financial and capacity budgeting. From the attendees of the webcast, 55 per cent did no Demand Management reporting, while the majority of the remainder (39 per cent) reported on the number of requests made for services/offerings. 

Organizations do appear to be reporting on SLM, although in a limited capacity. Only 17 per cent reported on all of the following areas: incidents near Service Level Agreement (SLA) breach, number of calls resolved within SLA and service requests near SLA breach. All other organizations who carried out SLA reporting only gathered metrics on one of these areas.

Ailsa Symeonides, Sales and Marketing Director at Axios Systems says, “In order for an IT department to provide an efficient service to the business, it must be able to produce meaningful reports that can be used to help continually improve the services it offers and provide a solid foundation for decision-making. Axios can help organizations with their reporting and Service Level Management projects through our assyst software, webcasts and workshops.”

Follow this link for more information on the Service Catalog webcast series.