hey everyone welcome back to the joy of reporting series I'm Robert Frederick it is so good to have you here I've been putting a lot of thought lately until why reporting is just so blah I don't know any other way to describe it but I'm talking about scopes of work that say do reporting as a deliverable process guides that have reporting as the final step with no other explanation the literally thousands of reports in every instance that never get run or the general lack of vision when it comes to reporting let's just put something on the dashboard and we'll go from there or put everything on the dashboard and we'll figure it out unless you're really deep into performance analytics and you should be there's too often a lack of vital energy of purpose and intent around reporting in the ecosystem I made the sub series to discuss the anatomy of good reporting and in this episode we're covering audience good reporting has a specific audience and different audiences require different reporting experiences let me ask you this if you wanted to tell your story of your service performance to the CIO would you come equipped with an excel sheet or maybe even the performance analytics hub no invariably you'd come with a PowerPoint deck with the Distilled story the few numbers you want them to attend to and the narrative around that story similarly if your job was to figure out what the story actually is you wouldn't start with PowerPoint you'd start with ServiceNow reporting or even in Excel or if you needed to link external data sources possibly a big bi tool so the audience matters from what you display to the tools you display it in I believe report consumers can be broken down into three personas persona number one the operator think of the most primitive ServiceNow solutions you've developed or heard about sometimes even simple tasks tracking is better than the alternative especially when we're talking about systems that existed in email the people executing these tasks do so from the operators perspective which is most commonly a list painting the key info of each task show me my work in what to do next is a report craved by the operator and the most mature solutions usually utilize performance analytics spotlight to intelligently rank the tasks persona number to the analyst once the operators are performing their processes and the data set starts really growing it's the analyst job to make sense of it all are there meaningful trends are we meeting the outcomes we desired in the first place what information supports strategic decisions the analysts need a broader array of tools in order to slice and dice the data than spot trends over time the analysts we use a broader selection of ServiceNow reports plus performance analytics to get the KPI data over time persona number three stakeholders and decision-makers this persona has the most overlap with actual jobs in the organization the stakeholder and decision maker can be everyone from the CIO to the nightshift manager of the service desk it's whoever requires the information distilled by the analyst they are the persona that receives the story and takes action or makes decisions based upon what they see in it and this is where reporting personas are under tooled in reality the stakeholders and decision-makers receive their reports in PowerPoint PDF or via oral communication but what if there's a tool to deliver this in service now enter vivid charts whose aesthetic control and narrative experiences can give you all the storytelling power of PowerPoint with none of the labor intensive data export and residual risk of PowerPoint Excel or other tools if you'd like a private demo vivid charts check out the links in the description below whether you do or not always remember the persona of the report dictates the kind of information you display and the interfaces that you display it in stay tuned for part two where we talk about access if you'd like to sponsor this channels content contact me via the email address pictured here if you'd like to contribute high quality high frequency content consider a donation if not I still appreciate your viewership consider hitting the like button and sharing with your network see the description for relevant links thanks for watching you